


The Next Great Adventure

by Jebiwonkenobi



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-04 07:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12164607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jebiwonkenobi/pseuds/Jebiwonkenobi
Summary: It is sometimes said that death is just a strange new beginning. That's certainly true for Julia Burnsides.





	1. Beyond the Veil

**Author's Note:**

> This is complete, barring another round of edits for later chapters, so I'll post the rest of this over the next couple of days. Includes spoilers through the end of the podcast, so probably listen to the whole thing first.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julia dies. And then things get weird.

Julia spent the years of the rebellion praying for the safety of pretty much everyone she knew. Family, friends, neighbors, clients - even people she only ever saw in passing, those who lived closer to the governor's house where things had a tendency to get violent more often. She prayed, every night until they had victory, that death wouldn’t come for these people,  _ her _ people, the citizens of Raven’s Roost. 

Of course it wasn’t a fool-proof method. Most of the time, her shortswords and Magnus’ broad axe were more effective when it came to protecting people and even then there were deaths. But most of the dead worked for the governor, and she and Magnus didn’t kill when they didn’t have to. It was, she had joked with him, probably the gentlest rebellion Faerûn had ever seen. 

When the column collapsed over the Craftsman Corridor, it had been months since she had prayed death away. She’d been so happy, she’d just forgotten to worry. The initial collapse flattens the half of the house that her father and their dog, Brutus sleep in, and she turns away from that yawning pit of horror and despair and climbs instead toward the sounds of whimpers and screams, toward people she can still help. She gets four of them out before a secondary collapse swipes her out of view, and she finds herself standing on the hill beyond the town wall, watching the dust rise into the sky. 

At first she thinks that some kind of magic saved her, and then she turns to see the Reaper. 

“Is it because I stopped praying?”

It’s a foolish question, but it slides out of her mouth almost before it pops into her head and she can’t exactly take it back.

The Reaper has curly hair and kind brown eyes and she gives Julia a look that is gentle and fond. “Of course not. It’s because some asshole decided to commit architecture-based homicide. Come on.”

The Reaper begins to walk away, and Julia doesn’t make the choice to follow but Raven’s Roost fades behind them anyway. The Reaper introduces herself as Rowan, and she asks Julia a series of questions before reciting a set of rules.  _ Don’t try to return to the material plane. Don’t try to contact people on the material plane. Exploration is a privilege which you will lose if you harass other spirits.  _ And so on. At the end she hands Julia a pamphlet with an illustration of a ghost on it surrounded by strange symbols. At the top it says, ‘ _ So you’re dead :( Now what?’ _

“In case you need a reminder,” says Rowan. 

“Am I going to a good place?” asks Julia. 

“Good is subjective,” says Rowan. “Most people like it, some don’t. But you aren’t going to Shadowfell, if that’s what you mean.”

Julia frowns. She doesn’t think that is what she meant at all. “Shadowfell?”

“Yeah. If you were to become, for instance, an incredibly powerful parasite that fed on the blood of others and tormented all the people in your kingdom for funsies-”

“Like a vampire?” asks Julia. 

“Like the  _ first _ vampire,” says Rowan. “Then the forces that rule Shadowfell would make a special, miserable place for you where you would be trapped for all eternity. But most people just go to the Astral plane.”

“What about the Nine Hells?” asks Julia. 

“You aren’t a demon,” says Rowan. “Nor, according to our records, have you ever made a deal with a demon. So no, Asmodeus has no claim on you.”

“But if, say, I was a shitty human who murdered a bunch of children for funsies and wasn’t actually very powerful at all?”

“You would still go to the Astral plane,” says Rowan. “Sometimes the Raven Queen - she’s the goddess in charge around here - sometimes she’ll tell us to single someone out and keep them away from other spirits. But existence here is what you make it, literally. Miserable little shits tend to make themselves miserable little places. Good people make good places. It all sort of works itself out. Come on now, you’ve got a little patch of land along a lake. It’s not too far from your parents.”

“My father already came through?” asks Julia. 

Rowan nods. “He was in a big hurry to see your mum again. I’d give them some alone time if I were you.” As she speaks, the lakeside materializes around them, and Brutus materializes with it. He barks and runs forward to sniff and lick Julia’s hands, and Julia scratches his head absently. The lake is beautiful, though the shimmering shapes beneath the surface are a little unnerving, and the hillside is dotted with tall trees and colorful flowers. It’s idyllic and remote and there is not a single structure within sight in any direction.

“What am I supposed to do now?” asks Julia. 

Rowan shrugs. “Whatever you want. Some people have buildings waiting for them, some build their own. Some just wander. You don’t need food or shelter. The weather will be whatever you feel like. The pamphlet provides some tips for all that. If you’re good, I need to get back - there are a lot of people to ferry out of Raven’s Roost tonight.”

“Of course,” says Julia, trying not to betray the flutter of confusion and panic in her chest. A second later she says, “Wait!”

Rowan tilts her head. 

“What about Magnus?” asks Julia. “My husband? Magnus Burnsides?”

Rowan blinks and consults her book. She flips through a few pages, sees something that makes her eyes widen and her eyebrows climb toward her hairline, and then she clears her throat. “Magnus isn’t currently dead,” she says carefully. “So he’ll have to be dealt with later. Sorry, I really have to go.”

Julia doesn’t like the sound of any of that, but before she can say anything, the Reaper is gone.

-

She spends the day toying with the weather and splashing about the lakeside with Brutus. The pamphlet tells her that her only limitation is essentially her own imagination, though there’s an extra layer of complexity that she’s not sure how to parse. She can imagine, for instance, trees, and weather, and changes in the landscape, and those things will change around her accordingly. Things will also often change according to what she wants or needs. If she’s cold she might come across a blanket, for instance, without necessarily having to focus on creating a blanket. But it’s a lot harder to create something more complex, like an animal, and nearly impossible to create a person. 

When she begins to think of sleep, more out of habit than any real need, a soft bed of flowers and vines rises to comfort her. When she wakes up she finds building materials piled neatly nearby, and she gets to work planning out the foundation of her home. She’s aware of time passing, but it’s somewhat meaningless from her perspective. She can tell, though she’s not sure how, that it’s been about three days on the material plane, but in that time she has experienced multiple seasons and only one night. It’s all a bit much to keep track of.

About a week passes, material time, before she seeks out her parents.

Once she starts looking she realizes it’s actually quite easy to find people. She holds her memories of them at the front of her mind and a path forms through the forest, leading from her space to theirs. Brutus trots along at her heels as she follows a surprisingly short, winding path, and when she clears the trees she finds a big old farmhouse with her mother and father on the front porch, sipping hot cocoa. It’s winter here, the snow perched neatly atop the roof and windmill and fence posts, pretty as a painting. Steven spots her first and leans over to her mother, whispering something in her ear. Mari’s face lights up as she turns, eyes searching. When they land on Julia’s face, her mouth splits into a grin and she hurriedly hands her cocoa to Steven so she can run down the steps and through the snow to fling her arms around Julia’s neck. 

Mari looks younger than Julia remembers her - they both do - and she holds onto Julia for a long time. “You are so lovely, and Steven says you’re just as brilliant and wonderful as I thought you’d be.”

Julia finds herself crying, and she tries to wipe her face without Mari noticing but it doesn’t work. “Oh don’t do that - there’s nothing to cry for here. I’ve missed you something terrible, come on in for some breakfast and tell me  _ everything _ .”

Julia talks for hours and shares two meals with them before heading back to her own space. It looks just as it did when she left - a dry, early fall morning, the beginnings of her cabin laid out on a hill. She develops a pattern, working on the house for a couple weeks, then visiting her parents for a day or two, rinse, repeat. She’s got a solid frame built by the time she gets bored and lonely and decides to try something new. 

Magnus never liked talking about his past, but she knows he can’t have just sprung up out of the ground. He had parents - Reina and Samira - and she could tell by how he talked about them that he loved them very much. She could also tell that they were gone, and so she hadn’t pressed him for too many details. But Julia is ‘gone’ now too, and so one day she stands at the edge of the forest, not far from the path to her parents, and she thinks very hard of Magnus, of everything he ever told her about his mothers, and she thinks particularly hard on the names  _ Reina and Samira Burnsides _ . 

Where the path to her own parents is a wide, well kept dirt road, the path that opens before her now is more or less a game trail. With a sigh, she follows it anyway. She explores for two days and finds many things - spaces between personal afterlives, where the remains of old places lie still and dormant. She learns that spirits lose form the longer they stay here, especially once there’s no one left on the material plane for them to worry about. They begin to float or become blurry at the edges, and then they begin to become abstract representations of themselves, and eventually they’re just shapes that exemplify a feeling. The restless flit from place to place, the angry sneak into other people’s spaces and call down lightning, the sad drift along in a cold mist, the happy settle in beautiful places and swirl. She realizes that’s what’s beneath her lake - happy old spirits - and she feels a lot better about it. 

But two days later she is no closer to finding anyone called Burnsides, and the moment she thinks wistfully of her hill on the lake, she’s back there. She naps in the sunlight with Brutus and works on her cabin and thinks. 

-

Her parents stop keeping track of time almost immediately. Julia visits them every couple weeks like clockwork, but sometimes her father will say, “Twice in as many days? Mari, we’ve won the lottery!” Or he’ll say, “We haven’t seen you in months, where have you been?” The second comment is invariably followed up by, “Is that boy of yours here yet?” By which he means Magnus, and the answer is invariably ‘no.’

Julia doesn’t give up looking for Magnus’ mothers, but she does get sidetracked pretty frequently. There’s an enormous wealth of knowledge lying about in forgotten places between inhabited afterlives, and she spends at least as much time haunting empty ruins as she does working on her cabin. Occasionally she spots a Reaper, and aside from Rowan she identifies four of them. It seems like a small number for the amount of spirits they must have to look after, but on one memorable and terrifying excursion she sees one of them in their skeletal form, chasing down a spirit that tried to escape. After that, she figures five of them are probably more than powerful enough to handle the whole of the Astral Plane and she starts avoiding them. She was told that exploration was fine, but she’d rather not find out that she shouldn’t be poking her nose into the past. As Magnus used to say, back when the rebellion was still just a few small acts of defiance - better to ask forgiveness than permission.

She thinks of him every time she sets out, and sometimes the game trail is wider, and it leads her to a specific person, but that person is never Reina or Samira. It’s usually someone from Raven’s Roost, and for the first couple years of her search, it’s all people who died around the same time Julia did. They all say things like,  _ this is so weird, I was just thinking of Magnus and now here you are! Is he with you? _ When Julia tells them he’s not, they usually smile a little and say  _ well maybe he’s trying to take out that bastard Kalen once and for all before he joins us, eh? _

She always leaves after that. It hurts her heart to think of Magnus alone and hunting down vengeance with nothing else to live for. 

Years pass. The cabin rises up out of nothing, and she builds furniture to fill it. She sleeps sporadically, mostly just for a change of pace. And then one day she approaches the path she built with Magnus’ name and finds it a little wider, and it leads her down into a cave she’s never seen before. She can hear a strange, intermittent sound, like waves crashing against a shore, and she follows a winding stone path down to a door, in front of which there are three figures. One of them is slumped against a wall to the side, thick white hair curtained over their face and a voluminous red robe obscuring their body. The other two are dwarven men, standing in front of a massive door and having a furious argument that they are trying to keep to a whisper. 

“Excuse me?” says Julia. They both jump and draw weapons as they turn to face her. 

“Who are you?” demands the older of the two. “How did you find this place? What are you doing here?”

He glares at her for a moment but then seems to register that she isn’t armed and lowers his weapon slightly. “Do you have any knowledge of healing? Please, quickly, she’s gravely injured.” He points at the figure slumped against the wall. 

“She’s not  _ injured _ ,” growls the other dwarf. “She’s  _ dead _ . Will you  _ please _ just  _ listen _ to me?”

“Hush now, Gundren, I don’t recall  _ you  _ ever showing any interest in medicine. Please, milady, if you can do anything...”

Gundren rolls his eyes and paces away as Julia moves toward the injured or possibly dead woman. There’s an umbrella tucked against her side, which seems weird, and when Julia brushes her hair aside to check for a pulse she finds a stunningly beautiful elf woman whose eyes are open and glassy. The veins in her neck and chest are blackened with some sort of poison and Julia looks up at the two dwarves as the older one swears. 

“You see, father?” says Gundren. “I  _ told _ you.”

“Well it’s only been a moment,” says the father, “do you have any magic, lass? Could you revive her?”

“She’s a friend of yours?” asks Julia. 

He hesitates a moment before saying, “Yes.”

“No she isn’t!” snaps Gundren. “You hate elves! Do you even know her name?”

His father ignores him, sheathing his weapon and stepping toward Julia to extend his hand. “My name is Cyrus Rockseeker, milady, and this mad imbecile is my son, Gundren. My friend here was helping me get this door open when she - ah - pricked her finger on something, and-”

“Bullshit!” shouts Gundren angrily. “Just  _ tell me _ what you did with the rest of the things in the vault!”

Cyrus glares at him.

“Listen to me, father,” says Gundren. “You’re  _ dead _ . I don’t know what happened but you both made it down here and opened the vault and then died, and I need you to tell me what you did with the rest of the treasure, okay? Please?”

Cyrus shakes his head, and the body beside Julia withers into a skeleton and then snaps back to being glassy-eyed and poisoned. “That’s ridiculous, Gundren,” he says. 

“Excuse me,” says Julia. “Sorry, you guys are going through something intense, and I hate to interrupt, I just... did either of you know a man named Magnus Burnsides?”

Something flickers across Gundren’s face and he clears his throat before he says, “I do. I hired my cousin Merle and a couple of guys to transport some goods from Neverwinter to Phandalin for me, and Burnsides was one of them.”

“You don’t have a cousin named Merle,” says Cyrus dismissively. 

Gundren frowns at him. “Of course I do. He’s older than I am, you should know him.”

Cyrus shakes his head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you or why you keep spouting nonsense, but we-”

Gundren opens his mouth to retort and Julia interrupts again. “Hey! Sorry again, very sorry, but Magnus - was he...was he okay?”

Gundren shrugs. “Sure. Big guy, confident, didn’t blink about the news of increased goblin activity in the area, and less greedy than that little-” He blinks, and then scowls, and then looks down at the body of the elf.

“What is it?” asks Julia. 

“The third guy was an elf, called himself Taako, didn’t seem too bright or interested in anything but money. But he looked just like  _ her _ .” He points at the elf and then scratches his head. “But he didn’t say anything when we...when...” He blinks again, and the elf withers back into a skeleton, her clothes rotting away but for the crimson robe which the umbrella tucks itself beneath. Gundren turns to the doors and suddenly they swing open, and the three of them look in on an empty domed vault made of black glass with one solitary figure in the center, wearing a silver gauntlet that is raised up into the air. 

“What the hell is this?” demands Cyrus. 

“That’s you,” says Gundren. “I tried - I was going to reopen this mine and use the wealth in this vault to do it. The transport gig was just to draw the goblins away, but everything went wrong. My brothers and I got jumped and our bodyguard turned out to be pretty useless. We were taken by this pompous wizard who called himself the Black Spider, he killed my brothers and dragged me down here to force me to open the vault but people showed up...Merle and the others, and a fucking orc.” He presses his hands to his head, squeezing his eyes shut, and then he says, quietly, “I’m dead too.” He looks up, past Cyrus, at Julia. “Aren’t I?”

Julia nods. 

“What?” says Cyrus nervously. “What are you talking about?”

“We finally got to the vault and it was empty, except for this and the umbrella outside. Merle tried to pick up the umbrella and it threw him across the room but when Taako grabbed it, it just shot off all this lightning and like...fireworks or something and we...man those guys were fucking  _ weird _ . And kind of assholes.”

“Says the one who hired them to get attacked by goblins,” says Julia. 

“Fair point,” says Gundren. “But we - my dad had been gone for like seven or eight years and we got into the vault and found this and Magnus just...high-fived him.”

“Yeah,” says Julia with a grimace. “He does that.”

Gundren shakes his head turning back to his father, his eyes full of rage. “I know what happened to everything else in the vault.” He gestures at Cyrus with his weapon and says, “You fucking burned it up.”

A moment later they’re engaged in a pretty brutal fight, and Julia sighs. She closes the elf’s eyes and holds her hand for a second. “I’m sorry you died here,” she says, and then she gets up and slinks away. 

Outside the cave she finds Rowan, looking irritable. When Rowan sees her, the frustration evaporates into confusion for a moment. “What are you doing here?” she asks. 

Julia shrugs. “Wandering.”

“Hmph,” says Rowan. “Well, best to stay away from these types.”

“They didn’t know they were dead,” says Julia. 

“Aye,” says Rowan, “and they’ll forget again soon enough. They can’t handle what they did.”

“What do you mean?” asks Julia. 

Rowan sighs. “One of them killed a woman for a powerful artifact which then burned up all his wealth and killed him. The other one got down there, took the artifact and used it to destroy the entire town of Phandalin. I don’t know if they’re just using it wrong or if it was cursed to begin with, but it packs one hell of a punch. You should move on, I’m going to have to break them up.  _ Again _ .”

“Thanks,” says Julia. “What about the woman? Is she here?”

Rowan shakes her head. “She never crossed into the Astral Plane.”

“How is that possible?” asks Julia. 

Rowan shrugs. “Maybe her soul got trapped by something. Hell, maybe she was a lich. We don’t know. Cyrus doesn’t remember her name.” She sighs and heads into the cave, giving Julia a wave as she disappears. 

Julia stares after her for a moment before slinking back into the forest. 

-

A few weeks later, when Julia sets out again, she picks a different portion of her forest to create the trail, and this time she thinks about a silver gauntlet and black glass. The path this creates is wide, and then it isn’t there at all, and then it’s more modest. It flickers a few times, but seems to settle. She frowns, takes a deep breath, and follows it. 

Brutus appears at her side and follows it with her, as if aware that she’s doing something unusual, something that might be dangerous. He looks younger as his ears flick and his eyes scan the path around them, and Julia gives him a friendly scowl. 

“Ah,” she says. “So all this time you’ve been old and lazy by  _ choice _ .”

Brutus pretends not to hear her, but his tail starts wagging at the sound of her voice before he can wrestle it back into stillness. 

The first place she finds is a personal afterlife. It’s a broad field, and two things exist in the center of it at the same time. One is an army standing triumphantly over their fallen enemies, their leader in the middle with his gauntleted fist raised in triumph. The other is a circle of black glass, perfectly round, perfectly smooth, with no bodies save for the one in the middle, right where their leader is standing. It’s a corpse on its knees, fist raised, the gauntlet sitting atop it without so much as a scratch, just like Gundren’s memory of Cyrus in the vault. The two things are layered over each other, like an afterimage when you look at something too bright or for too long. A man paces around the outside of the circle, tearing at his hair and clothes, shouting occasionally, eyes glued to the gauntlet.

Julia glances at Brutus and considers her options for a few minutes before taking a breath and stepping forward. “Excuse me? Sir?”

The man jolts and whirls around to face her, drawing a sword and rushing to stand between her and the circle, flinging his arms wide as if he can hide the entire thing with only his body. “Get away!” he shouts at her. “It’s mine!”

Julia glances at Brutus again, who growls at the man but in a noncommittal way. He seems as confused as she is. “What is?”

“You can’t fool me,” snaps the man. “I know you’re here to take the gauntlet. I just can’t figure out what you’ve done to hide it. What is this barrier?”

“I don’t-”

“It’s  _ mine _ !” he shouts at her. “I found it! I earned it! It’s  _ mine _ !” Flecks of spit fly from his mouth as he rages, and Julia takes a step back, and then another. He keeps shouting at her, nonsense about how it chose him, about how she has no right to keep it from him. She moves away slowly at first, but he doesn’t seem inclined to step away from the gauntlet so eventually she breaks into a run and doesn’t stop until she’s back on the path. Her head aches a little as she looks back at the scene she left behind, and she feels like there is something obvious right in front of her that she can’t grasp. It’s like having a word you know but can’t quite remember sitting on the tip of your tongue. She turns away and keeps moving.

She finds eleven more, and with each one the headache gets worse. Some are the remains of towns. Some are the remains of battles. Many have people pacing at the edges, people who can see themselves holding the gauntlet in the afterimage they’re staring at but who can’t actually reach it. One of them is a shadow of Phandalin, haunted by some of the people who died there. At the last glass circle, she finds something different. 

It’s the remains of another city but there’s no afterimage on this one, just the glass and the burnt corpse in the center, its fist upraised with the gauntlet on it. Sitting at the edge of the circle is a boy in his teens, his knees tucked up against his chest. Julia approaches cautiously and calls out to him, and he turns to look at her with surprise, but he doesn’t react violently the way the others have. 

“Who are you?” he asks when she reaches him. 

“My name is Julia Burnsides. This is Brutus.”

He looks at the dog with a sad smile and holds his hand up for Brutus to smell. Brutus licks it and flops over next to him. “I’m Jacob,” he says. 

Julia sits down on the other side of the dog, scratching his belly. “What happened?” she asks. 

Jacob sighs. “I found it. It was on a suit of armor in an old part of the castle. My mom worked there, and I was helping her clean because she - she wasn’t feeling well. And we couldn’t afford for her to lose the job, so...” He trails off for a while. And then, angrily, he says, “She wasn’t sick.”

“I didn’t say she was,” says Julia softly. 

“No, I know, but I was making it  _ sound _ like- but she wasn’t sick. She had a broken rib and I had to pop her shoulder back into place because her worthless shitrag of a husband lost his temper again. We’re all dead now, I should be able to say this.”

He fumes quietly for a few minutes, and Julia just waits. 

“I found it on a suit of armor. It stuck out because it didn’t match the other hand, and then it...this is going to sound weird, but it  _ talked _ to me. It said that if I put it on, we could make him stop. I just wanted him to  _ stop _ . He was gonna kill her, I just knew it, and every time she tried to leave it was like he was suddenly everywhere. Like he had eyes in every inch of the city. So I took the gauntlet. Just in case. I hid it in my room, and I tried - I knew it was powerful, so I wasn’t going to use it unless I had to. It was just in case. But he hit Mandy. My - my little sister. He hit her and she was bleeding and crying and he was still rampaging and I just wanted him to  _ stop _ . So I put it on.” He waves a hand at the scene before them. “And that’s what happened.”

Julia looks up at the devastation, sorrow and horror burrowing into her chest. “I’m so sorry.”

Jacob shrugs. 

“When was this?” asks Julia. 

He shrugs again, but he thinks about it, and a moment later he says, “I stopped keeping track, so I’m not sure, but it was harvest season, eight...eight years ago? It - I think it was 1350 P.R.”

And finally, the thing that’s been on the tip of her tongue spills over, and she hears herself say, “During the Relic Wars?”

The headache gets worse and then eases away entirely as she has the very strange experience of remembering something she is certain she didn’t know about before she spoke to this boy. She remembers the constant fighting, the flow of refugees and scarcity of food. She remembers three years of endless destruction and violence, which felt like it would last forever until suddenly it just  _ stopped _ . Magnus moved to Raven’s Roost around that time, when the leaders and kings of Faerûn were trying to figure out why they had been positioning their armies at the borders of neighboring countries they’d been at peace with for years. The evidence and aftermath of all the fighting had been  _ everywhere _ , but Julia - and, apparently, everyone else - had just...stopped thinking about it. Or talking about it. Or  _ remembering _ it. 

“There was no war on then,” says Jacob, snapping her out of her reverie. 

“But there was right after,” says Julia, as much to herself as to him. “All across the world, terrible wars. People turned on each other, cities were destroyed. They would disappear or be swallowed up by the forest or drowned in a mad storm. One town turned into peppermint. Everyone wanted these things, we called them the Grand Relics. But every time someone got hold of one it ended in disaster.”

“I probably shouldn’t feel good about not being the only one who fucked up, huh?” asks Jacob. 

Julia turns to him. “Jacob, this wasn’t your fault. You don’t have to sit here and beat yourself up about it. You should find Mandy and your mother. You should make sure they’re happy.”

“I killed them,” says Jacob. 

“Well, yeah,” says Julia. “And that kind of sucks. But if it was me, I’d understand. I’d miss you. I’d just want to know you were okay. Find them. The worst that can happen is that you’re right, and they’d rather be alone. But it would be better to know, wouldn’t it?”

He shrugs, but she can tell he’s considering it. She climbs to her feet, and Brutus drags himself up with a sigh. 

“Hey,” says Jacob. “How did it end? Where did this gauntlet end up?”

“I don’t know,” says Julia. “But I intend to find out.”


	2. Echoes, strangers and dates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julia investigates, meets some familiar faces, and gets some answers. She also gets about 5 million more questions so all in all, a mixed bag.

The months drag on. She carves decorations for her home, and visits her parents, and explores. She finds more destruction left by the relics, more devastation from the wars, but no sign of what stopped the fighting. 

She plays with Brutus in the lake in high summer, swimming around with the shapes of ancient happy spirits who seem to enjoy her antics. She teases her father over his own furniture-making and learns recipes from her grandparents, who don’t so much walk as glide, and are beginning to blur at the edges. She hears nothing from the material plane, and finds no one related to Magnus, and she worries. Sometimes her worry is just a chill breeze, but sometimes it builds up into a thunderstorm on the other side of the lake. It makes the spirits in the water uncomfortable, so she tries to keep the skies calm, but it’s hard. 

Occasionally the path she built for finding Magnus’ relatives gets a bit wider, and she follows it to some new place, to someone who is thinking of him, but when it’s not someone from Raven’s Roost it’s usually unpleasant. She finds an ancient library brimming with spirits who are all sharing knowledge with one another, but she can hardly differentiate between one person and the next and has no idea who she ought to ask for information, so after a cursory investigation she moves on. She also finds a massive garden, but whoever lives in it is in a rage when she stops in, and she slinks away rather than interrupt their ranting. 

The next afterlife that she comes across materializes as a city she’s seen paintings of but never visited - Goldcliff, the vacation destination of Faerûn.

It’s dry and hot and beautiful, with tall glittering buildings and several small rivers rushing toward a pool where they join together before leaping off the cliffs. Julia wanders through the dusty and deserted streets aimlessly until she hears laughter, which she follows all the way to a large shop with its rolling metal door wide open. Inside are two women, a half-elf and a halfling, who are engaged in good-natured bickering while they work on a pair of truly impressive horseless battle wagons. Julia stares for a moment, caught up by the sight of the enormous machines, and she doesn’t realize they’ve spotted her until she notices that things are suddenly quiet. 

“Uh, hey,” says the halfling. “You lost?”

Julia shrugs. “I think that’s mostly a matter of perspective these days. These wagons are amazing. You built them yourselves?”

“Of course,” says the half-elf with pride, slapping the side of her wagon fondly. “Best racers in Goldcliff.”

“Technically-” begins the halfling, but her friend flings a towel at her. 

“ _ No _ ,” says the half-elf, “that little shit does  _ not _ get the title of Best Racer in Goldcliff just because he-”

“- Followed the rules and won the race?” asks the halfling with a broad, toothy grin. 

“In  _ my _ wagon!”

“Well, you can still have the title of Best Battle Wagon  _ Maker _ ,” says the halfling reasonably. “No one is trying to take  _ that  _ from you.”

The half-elf makes a furious noise and returns to hammering something into place, using a bit more force now than she had been when Julia first walked up. The halfling wipes her hands off and approaches the door with a smirk. “I’m Hurley, that’s Sloane. Who are you?”

“Julia Burnsides.”

Hurley’s eyes widen and her mouth drops open. “ _ No _ . What?” 

“You knew Magnus?” asks Julia, almost afraid of the hope that wells up within her. 

“Hell yeah I knew Magnus,” says Hurley with a grin. She peers at Julia with renewed interest. “You’re his...?”

“Wife,” says Julia. 

Hurley beams at her. “Hey Sloane, get over here, turns out Magnus had a super hot wife!”

Sloane grunts. “I can’t hear you over the sound of what a shitty battle wagon racer Taako is.”

“Come on, don’t be like that,” says Hurley. She smirks at Julia. “Taako used a spell to swap places with her seconds before she crossed the finish line, she’s still pretty salty about it. Come on in, I’ll tell you about it over lunch.”

Julia spends a couple days with them, swapping stories about Magnus, listening to Hurley recount the battle wagon race, and watching the two of them race one another. Hurley tells her it’s not as exciting with only two wagons, but to Julia it still looks plenty exciting and more than a little dangerous.

“So why was Magnus there?” asks Julia. 

Hurley hesitates, her smile growing brittle.

Sloane sighs. “They came after me. I had a sash that let me control nature and I was completely out of control. If they hadn’t helped Hurley stop me, I’d have destroyed the whole city. Instead I just got the two of us killed.”

Hurley takes her hand. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I should have known better,” says Sloane. 

“Well, they do say the Grand Relics have a pretty powerful thrall,” says Julia. 

They both blink, and she sees the same thing happen to them that happened to her when she was talking to Jacob. 

“Holy shit,” says Hurley. “It totally was, it was the fucking Gaia sash. How did we not make that connection? It’s  _ just _ like all the stories from the...the wars. Did I just  _ forget _ about the wars?”

“I did too,” says Sloane, frowning. “I think everyone did.  _ No one _ talked about it anymore after...what, six years ago?”

Julia asks them a few more questions about the sash, but Sloane can’t quite remember how she found it, and all they know is that the boys took it with them when they left. 

They make her promise to visit again, and before she leaves Hurley presses a bear mask into her hands. 

“I had this made for him,” she says. “He did good. I think they were all pretty bummed that they couldn’t save us, but...” She glances back at Sloane, her face warm and soft and full of love. “They did good.”

“Thank you,” says Julia. 

-

She goes to sleep on a warm summer afternoon a few tendays later and wakes on a crisp, early winter morning. She pulls on slippers and mittens and Brutus follows along at her heels as she takes a mug of hot caramel cider toward the door, intending to drink it on the porch while the sun rises. When she opens the door she finds a Reaper standing there, his hand raised to knock. For a moment, they look at each other with surprise. 

Julia recovers first. Her mind works furiously, trying to think if she’s done anything that would warrant a dressing down, and she says, “Good morning! How can I help you? Do you want some cider?”

She holds the mug forward. 

He blinks at it and clears his throat. He’s handsome, with his tailored Reaper suit, manicured nails, neat dreadlocks and trimmed, fluffy beard, but he looks almost  _ nervous _ . 

“I’ve come to deliver a message,” he says, as if the words are being dragged out of him. 

“Is that a no on the cider?” asks Julia. 

He looks at the mug again and sighs. “It does smell good.”

“Excellent,” says Julia with a broad smile. She pushes the mug into his hands and turns around to go and retrieve another from her kitchen. It’s waiting on the counter for her, and she stirs it as she returns to the door. “Come, sit.” She leads him over to a handcrafted table and couch and curls up on one end, holding the mug close to her face so she can breathe in apples and cinnamon. She gestures for the Reaper to sit across from her but he hesitates and Brutus takes his spot. Julia scowls at the dog, but the Reaper just pulls over a stool and perches on that instead. 

“This is excellent,” he says, meaning the cider. 

“Thanks,” says Julia. “I wished it into being all by myself.”

He smiles into his mug, but still doesn’t say anything. 

“Who are you?” she asks. 

“My name is Kravitz,” he says with a sigh. “I’m a-”

“Reaper,” says Julia. “Yeah, y’all stand out a bit.”

He smiles again. “And you’re Julia Burnsides.”

Julia nods. “You had a message?”

“This is very unusual,” says Kravitz. “We aren’t generally - this isn’t done. But I owe him a favor, and I guess...” He sighs again. “Magnus sends his love.”

Julia is somewhat unprepared for the rush of emotion that follows this statement. On the one hand -  _ joy _ . Finally, some word from Magnus himself, but at the same time...what in the nine hells was Magnus doing near a Reaper? 

From the day Magnus Burnsides first arrived in Raven’s Roost, he was very clearly two things. Kind and reckless. At first, the two were related. He would throw himself unthinking into danger to protect people who were smaller or weaker than he was. But as time went on, the recklessness took on a life of its own, as if he just didn’t think there was any point in being careful with himself. When he and Julia began seeing each other, that reckless streak was curbed, but she has to assume, knowing Magnus as well as she does, that it would have returned with a vengeance when she died. Part of her is surprised he hasn’t shown up already. But the rest of her is worried. She misses Magnus terribly, but the world deserves to have kind, gentle, powerful men in it.

“Is he -” her voice falters. “Is he dead? Is he dying?”

“Neither, currently,” says Kravitz before sipping his cider.

“ _ Currently _ ,” repeats Julia with a scowl. “Rowan said that too,  _ why _ ? Why phrase it that way?”

Kravitz sighs again. “Magnus was a bounty of mine, up until recently.”

Julia blinks, and all her musings about Magnus and what he may or may not be recklessly rushing into at this very moment seem to fizzle. “Bounty?” she repeats flatly. 

“Yes,” says Kravitz. “Some people try to avoid coming here by becoming liches and the like. Some escape, or at least try to. Or a living magic-user steals souls from here to fuel their magic. When any of that happens, I am given a bounty, and I hunt down the offenders and set things right.” He sips his cider again and then says, “Magnus hasn’t done any of those things, but he  _ has _ died nineteen times so far, and that is very definitely against the rules.”

Julia stares at him. “Nine- _ Nineteen _ ? It’s only been five years! Hasn’t it?”

“Since you died?” asks Kravitz. “Yes, a little more than five.”

“He’s died  _ nineteen _ times in five years?” demands Julia. 

“Well, no,” says Kravitz. He frowns, looking down into his mug as if it might offer him up some answers. “He hasn’t died at all in the last five years.”

Julia closes her eyes for a moment and tries to process this. Then she opens them and climbs to her feet, pacing as her breath fogs the air. “So Magnus,  _ my _ Magnus, when I met him, had already died nineteen times.”

“Yes,” says Kravitz. 

“I mean - even once is against the rules right? Or is there a threshold? Once or twice you can get away with but nineteen is a problem?”

“No,” says Kravitz, “Once is against the rules. That’s how death works. It’s supposed to be a one and done thing.”

“Right,” says Julia. “But you didn’t start looking for him until he hit nineteen?”

“Well, I didn’t - we never really had a lead on him. He turned up in the book one day-”

“What book?” interrupts Julia. 

“The Book of Death and Bounties,” says Kravitz. “He turned up and we didn’t have any leads. Never did, actually. I found him by accident while I was hunting a necromancer - him and a couple other bounties of mine. Taako, who has died eight times, and Merle fucking Highchurch who has died  _ fifty-seven _ times.”

Julia stares at him. “Did they start a club?” she demands. 

Kravitz laughs. “I don’t know, maybe. But they stopped the necromancer and saved my ass, so the bounties have been forgiven, with the warning that they are not allowed to die anymore without coming here.”

Julia takes a breath and resumes pacing. “Did he die nineteen times in one day or over a period? Does it tell you  _ how _ he died?”

“Well, it does, but the how’s are mostly all the same.”

“Fighting?” asks Julia. 

“Fighting,” confirms Kravitz. “Though on one occasion he died of mushroom poisoning.”

Julia’s not sure what to do with that information. “And the first question?” she presses. 

Kravitz shrugs. “I keep a pretty close eye on this book. I don’t remember the number ever  _ not _ being nineteen. In fact, there were seven names that just showed up one day, nearly ten years ago. Magnus Burnsides, Merle Highchurch, Taako Tacco, Chalupa Tacco, Barold Bluejeans, Lucretia Ironsides, and Dale Davenport. They’ve each died a different number of times, all of them more than once, and only two of them have changed since their bounties first appeared.”

Julia stops pacing and looks up. “Changed?”

“They died again,” Kravitz clarifies. He’s staring out over the lake, lost in his own train of thought, and his voice sounds distant.

Julia’s willing to put good money on one of those people being the woman Cyrus killed, so she says, “Chalupa and who else?”

Kravitz looks up, shaken from his reverie. “Barold. How did you know about Chalupa?”

“Lucky guess,” says Julia. “When was that?”

Kravitz gives her a skeptical look but he says, “A little over two years after the bounties appeared. Neither of them crossed over.”

The bounties appeared around the time the relic wars started, and the only two additional deaths took place around the time they ended. Were the strange death tolls something to do with the relics, then? “None of this makes any sense,” she says, more to herself than anything but Kravitz responds anyway. 

“You’re telling me,” he mutters. “The Raven Queen isn’t happy about it. Even less so since I pardoned three of them.”

“Why did you?” asks Julia. 

Kravitz looks up at her, surprised. “I told you, they saved-”

Julia waves a hand dismissively. “Yes, but I - there’s a prison, isn’t there?”

Kravitz shifts uncomfortably and looks away from her. “Yes.”

“So you could’ve just brought them here but not put them in prison and still repaid your debt,” says Julia. 

“Yes,” says Kravitz, “the Raven Queen thought so too.”

“So why didn’t you?” asks Julia. 

Kravitz worries his fingers over the wiry curls of his beard and sighs. “I don’t know. It felt wrong. They just fought so  _ hard _ .” He straightens up after he says it, like he hadn’t meant to let it slip out. 

Julia smiles at him. “If the other two are anything like Magnus, I know what you mean.”

“I should go,” says Kravitz, standing up and placing his half-drained mug of cider on the table. “Your husband is a good man.” He considers her for a moment, and then he taps the table with the nail of his forefinger and disappears in a swirl of black smoke. The air shimmers above the wood, where his finger touched it, and a cloud forms, and within the cloud is an image. 

There’s a room Julia doesn’t recognize, full of strange mechanical equipment and glittering pink crystal. Taako, who does indeed look almost exactly like Chalupa, eyes her appraisingly while a dwarf with a wooden arm who she assumes is Merle brushes himself off. And there, pinned under a large, heavy looking mirror, is Magnus. He waves a hand as if to get her attention and then winces as if the movement hurts something and says, “Hey, one more thing. Tell Julia I said I love her.”

Julia smiles at him, her eyes filling with tears as she hears Kravitz’s voice from nowhere and realizes this must be his memory.  _ Alright- there's a lot of Julia's over there but-- nevermind, I'm kidding, I know who you're talking about. _

Magnus smiles a small, gentle smile and says, quietly, “Thank you.”

The cloud begins to fade, and Julia watches Magnus as long as she can but she can’t keep Kravitz from turning toward Taako, who smirks and winks just before the cloud dissipates entirely, taking the images with it. 

Julia spends a long time sitting on the couch with Brutus, conjuring Magnus’ face in her memory again and again, watching his mouth form the words. 

“I love you, too, Magnus,” she whispers.

-

The next day she sets out again, and this time she thinks of the three of them instead of Magnus and his mothers. The path is widens, becoming a bit more than a game trail, and she follows it first to the outskirts of an island prison which she has heard of, but never seen. She looks up at it for a while, the massive gray fortress so drab and unforgiving next to the colorful afterlives she’s seen, but she elects not to get any closer to it and keeps walking. She passes by Hurley and Sloane’s rendition of Goldcliff and then wanders into a strange, metallic building that looks oddly familiar. It takes her a moment to realize it’s the same lab she saw in Kravitz’ vision. Sitting at a table, tinkering with machine parts, is a woman in her late forties. She has soft brown eyes and a beautiful coral colored headscarf, and she looks up and sets down her tools when Julia walks in, her expression tense and resigned. 

“Did she change her mind?” asks the woman. 

“Who?” asks Julia. 

“The Raven Queen?”

“Oh. Uh, no. Or I don’t know, I guess. I’m not a Reaper.”

The woman sags a bit with relief. “Sorry. Kravitz convinced her not to put me back in the prison, but I keep worrying she’ll change her mind. Who are you? Can I help you?”

“Julia Burnsides.”

“Oh.” The woman folds her hands on the table and looks down at them, the relief transitioning back into tense resignation again. “Do you -” she starts, and then stops herself. 

“Can you tell me what happened?” asks Julia. 

The woman nods. She introduces herself as Maureen, and she tells Julia about another of the Grand Relics, only she doesn’t ever describe it that way. She explains what it does, like everyone in the world didn’t hear descriptions of each item during the wars when people everywhere were scrambling to control one. She talks about her son, Lucas, and their work, and the virulent crystal, and the strangers who came down and stopped several terrible things from happening. 

“I’m sorry that my son tried to kill your husband,” she tells Julia. 

“It sounds like Magnus has already forgiven him,” says Julia. “So, they...they work for the people you and your son were working for?”

Maureen nods. “The Bureau of Balance, though I suppose that just sounds like static to you.” She sighs. 

“Why would it sound like static?” asks Julia.

Marueen blinks at her. “It didn’t?”

Julia shakes her head. 

“Well that’s interesting,” says Maureen. “I  _ had _ wondered if it applied to other planes or-”

Julia raises her eyebrows, and Maureen sighs and dives into an explanation of the Bureau’s voidfish, which they used to force everyone to forget the wars  _ and _ the grand relics, effectively stopping the fighting. 

“They’ve been trying to gather all the grand relics and destroy them so that they can’t be used to sow destruction anymore, but they weren’t making much progress until your husband and his friends showed up.”

“Why not?” asks Julia. 

Maureen shrugs. “As far as I know they hadn’t acquired any before they hired Magnus, Merle and Taako as Reclaimers. Lucretia was getting pretty desperate.”

“Lucretia Ironsides?” asks Julia.

Maureen shrugs. “She’s the Director of the bureau, mostly she insists people just call her by her title. Lucas always called her by her name.”

Julia taps her fingers on the table. “Who else works there?”

“A lot of people,” says Maureen. “Lucas worked more directly with them than I did. Other than your husband’s Reclaimer team, the only one I met was one of the Regulators who were sent to kill Lucas.”

“They were sent to kill him?” asks Julia, surprised. 

Maureen nods. “They were pretty upfront about that, he knew what the consequences would be from the beginning. It’s harsh, but after all the devastation these things caused...I understand the reasoning. Lucas did too, he just wanted me back so badly that he lost sight of...well, everything. I love my son, but he didn’t have the clearest moral compass to begin with.” She sighs. “But Magnus told Lucretia that he was dead, and they took the relic away from him, so as long as he keeps his head down he should be safe.”

Julia nods, only half-listening. “But you never heard of anyone called Chalupa or...” She tries to remember the other names that Kravitz listed off. “Barold? Or Davenport?”

Maureen shakes her head until the last one, at which point she says, “Oh! Lucas said Lucretia had a valet called Davenport. Strange little man, I remember because Lucas said that the only thing Davenport ever said was his own name.”

Julia scowls at that, and after a few more fruitless questions she excuses herself and heads back home. Brutus is overjoyed to see her, and the lake laps at the shore as the spirits within rejoice at her return as well. Julia smiles at all of them and leads Brutus back up onto the porch, where she slides down onto her couch, her mind swimming with answers that just create more riddles. 

“Magnus,” she sighs. “What have you gotten into?”

-

A few months later, by material time, Kravitz reappears. Julia lowers the temperature and brings him some cider and they sit on the porch steps, looking out over the lake for a while before he says anything. When he does speak, he sounds frustrated and worried. “They died again, all three of them, the _idiots_. _Twelve_ _times_.”

Julia hums at this, and some whipped cream topped with sugar and cinnamon appears on top of their ciders. Kravitz slurps at his and ends up with white foam over top of his facial hair.

“I  _ told _ them,” he says, “I  _ warned _ them that they couldn’t just - and then -  _ twelve times _ !”

“How?” asks Julia. 

“Purple worm, mostly,” says Kravitz. 

“That’s new,” says Julia. 

“They actually mature very slowly so it was almost certainly quite ancient,” says Kravitz. 

“I meant for Magnus,” says Julia. She ignores the small voice in her head that says that if Magnus had died nineteen times and never brought it up, he might have run into a purple worm or two without mentioning it as well. 

“Oh,” says Kravitz. “Well, sure.” He scratches at his beard. “It wasn’t even just them, this time, there’s an  _ entire town _ of people who have been dying over and over - how am I going to convince the Raven Queen not to bring them in  _ now _ ?”

“Have you talked to them?” asks Julia. 

“No. Yes. Sort of.” Kravitz slurps at his whipped cream again. “When they finally stopped bloody  _ dying _ I went to that ridiculous moon base they live on to wait for them.” He stews quietly over this for a moment before looking up to find Julia giving him an incredulous glare.

“What?” asks Kravitz. 

“You’re just going to say something like ‘ridiculous moon base’ and not follow up on it? What the fuck does that even mean? They live on the moon?”

“No,” says Kravitz. “It only looks like a moon. It sort of flies around and if you’re standing on the ground it looks like a second moon but it’s just like a really massive...sky...platform...that people live on.”

Julia sighs. “Okay, I promise you that when you look less like someone just kicked your favorite puppy, I am going to make you explain that fully. So you waited for them. Then what?”

He shifts uncomfortably again. “Well. I waited - I mean, I thought they’d all come back together and I wanted to catch them alone but for whatever reason they split up after getting back to the base so I was waiting in their rooms and Taako was the only one who showed.” He takes another large slurp of whipped cream. 

Julia gives him a sidelong look and then thinks back over the memory he showed her, with Taako winking at the end.  

“It’s probably better that it was just him,” Kravitz says. “At least he didn’t have to have his arm cut off or cut anyone else’s arm off the last time we met.”

“Wait,  _ what _ ?” demands Julia. Kravitz sighs and gives her his version of what happened in Maureen and Lucas’ lab, which fills in a few holes and still leaves several gaping blank spots. 

He sighs when he finishes and says, “The thing is, you were right. I let them off easy, even considering the special circumstances. And you and Raven both asked me why and I didn’t really have a reason, and now they’ve done it  _ again _ , after I told them in no uncertain terms that I would drag them all back here if they did, but here I am lurking in their rooms waiting for someone to give me a good enough reason to just not do my fucking job  _ again _ . And I’m  _ not _ new at this. I was human once but that was so long ago now that anyone who knew me when I was alive doesn’t even exist here the way you do, they’re all ancients.” He gestures vaguely toward the lake as he says this, and takes another sip of cider. “And that’s if they haven’t just dissipated into ethereal nothingness. I’m  _ good _ at my job. It’s not always easy or uplifting but I’ve never had any trouble doing it and I just don’t...who the hell even  _ are _ these guys?”

“Mmm,” says Julia. “So, just so we’re on the same page here, your main questions are: who the fuck are these guys and how do they keep getting into such uniquely weird trouble, what am I going to say to the Raven Queen to keep her from squashing them like bugs, and - and this is just an inkling I have so let me know if I’m totally off - why do my insides curl up like a moonflower when faced with the brilliant sunshine that is Taako’s face?”

Kravitz gives her a look of surprise and confusion and opens his mouth to deny this last statement but no sound comes out, and then realization begins to dawn across his face. “Ah,” he says. He clears his throat. “Oh no. No, no. No.”

“Not trying to be contrary here, but that sounds like a pretty solid yes,” says Julia. “As in ding, ding, ding, all three are correct.”

Kravitz groans. 

“Okay,” she says, a slow grin spreading across her face. “So they died twelve times, you followed up by hanging out in their rooms like a creep, and then what?”

“Well it’s not - they have a suite of rooms with a common area in the middle, and I was waiting there. It’s not that creepy,” says Kravitz. 

“Not if your crush is into unannounced visitors, I guess,” says Julia. 

“Ugh,” says Kravitz. “Come on. I’m the grim fucking reaper. I don’t have a ‘crush.’”

“Sure,” says Julia. “And _then_ _what_?”

“He said that they were sent to a town that was stuck in a time loop and that it took them a few tries to fix it and that he would explain fully and honestly later, but that he had just died twelve times and if I didn’t get the fuck out and let him have a nap immediately he was going to add hot Reaper homicide to his list of misdeeds.” Kravitz looks mournfully into his cider. “I’m not sure if he meant that  _ I’m _ hot or that the homicide itself would be hot.”

Julia rolls her eyes. “Ah, the delicious allure of a man who might be turned on by murder.”

“This is probably the worst feeling I have ever felt,” says Kravitz. “I may vomit. I have not vomited in several centuries, I’m not even sure what would come up.”

“Cider, probably,” says Julia. “If it helps, I’m fairly certain he meant that  _ you _ are hot.” 

“What makes you say that?” asks Kravitz miserably. 

“Well, first of all, you are. Second, I’m fairly certain that Magnus wouldn’t hang around with someone who was genuinely turned on by murder.” 

This seems to cheer him up a little, and he sips at his cider. “I tuned his stone of farspeech to mine, he’s supposed to let me know when he can talk.”

“Ah,” says Julia with a grin. “So now we wait. What are you going to wear when he calls you?”

Kravitz looks up in alarm. “Wear? I only have this one - I mean it’s not gross, I don’t sweat or anything, and I can just banish any blood or dirt that gets on me, but I only wear the one thing. I don’t have other things. Do I need to have other things?”

His panic is almost endearing enough for her to reassure him that he doesn’t, but it’s not every day that a desperate Reaper asks you for fashion advice, so instead she drags him inside and enjoys a few solid hours of inventing clothes for him to try on. Eventually they find themselves sitting on her bed, wearing fancy gowns and feather boas and eating ice cream.

“You don’t  _ really _ think I should wear this, do you?” he asks. 

She looks him up and down. “Maybe save that for the second date.”

Kravitz rolls his eyes. “This isn’t a date. And I think you’ve just been using me for cheap entertainment.”

“ _ Kravitz, _ ” says Julia, pressing a hand to her chest and pretending to be highly offended. “I would  _ never _ call you cheap.”

He laughs and adjusts his feather boa so it doesn’t get ice cream on it. 

“Hey Kravitz?” she asks. 

“Yeah?” 

“The town you mentioned, that was also dying over and over again?”

“Refuge,” says Kravitz. “What about it?”

“They died twelve times too?” asks Julia. 

He laughs a hollow laugh. “Oh no. No, they’ve been dying every hour for nearly a decade.”

She gapes at him, and part of her wants to comment on how horrible that is but the rest of her is already moving ahead to draw connections and what comes out of her mouth is, “So...since Magnus and the others turned up in your book?”

Kravitz frowns. “Yeah, now you mention it. The town wasn’t in the book until just recently though, something was keeping it from registering.”

“One of the grand relics?” asks Julia. 

Kravitz blinks. “Why do you say that?”

“The names turned up in 1350, right?”

Kravitz gives her a blank look. “I don’t know what that means.”

“The year,” says Julia, “was it 1350 P.R.?”

Kravitz shrugs.

Julia imitates the motion back at him irritably. “What does that mean?”

“It means mortal time isn’t terribly relevant here. I was briefly interested in how they track it once, a few centuries ago, but they have like twenty different systems-”

“There are twelve at  _ most _ ,” says Julia dismissively. 

“See, your tone indicates that  _ I’m _ the one being ridiculous here but I would like to point out that each of those calendars start counting forward from some arbitrary mortal event and that I exist outside of time and mortality and do not care.”

“So how do you track time here?” asks Julia. 

Kravitz shrugs again. “We generally don’t need to get too specific beyond about a century back, so we have a rotating list of ten names for each decade of the last century. We’re about to pass from Silvanus 9 to Oghma 0.”

Julia raises her eyebrows.  

“They’re named after the Raven Queen’s friends,” he says a little sheepishly. 

“Okay,” says Julia. “Well, I died in 1355 P.R., which is...Silvanus 5?”

“Yes, that tracks,” says Kravitz. 

“And those names turned up in Silvanus 0?”

“Yes,” says Kravitz again. 

“Which is 1350,” says Julia, “which is right before the Relic Wars started.”

“You think the seven of them and their weird deaths were related to the Relic Wars?” asks Kravitz. 

Julia shrugs. “I’ve been talking to people who have known Magnus since I died,” says Julia. “Everywhere he’s shown up recently, there’s been a grand relic involved. Maureen says they’ve been collecting and destroying them. She says they’re ‘Reclaimers for the Bureau of Balance,’ whatever that means.” She hesitates, considering, and adds, “She told me the Bureau Director’s name is Lucretia.”

“Ironsides?” asks Kravitz immediately. 

“She wasn’t sure, she only knew that the Director’s name is Lucretia and that she has a valet called Davenport. And you know how Phandalin was destroyed?”

“Yes,” says Kravitz with a sigh. “That was a lot of work.”

“Well, Magnus, Taako and Merle were there too. The dwarf who destroyed it, Gundren? He used one of the grand relics. His father Cyrus had it first, but he died with it eight years ago in a cave along with an elven woman who looks  _ just _ like Taako.”

“Hmm,” says Kravitz, lost in thought. 

“More importantly,” says Julia, “I can’t find a single memory or indication of any of the relics from before 1350. I can’t find any mention of them, either. If Magnus lived somewhere or knew someone before he moved to Raven’s Roost, either none of them have died or none of them made it here.”

Kravitz takes a bite of ice cream, frowning. “What are the chances that seven of my weirdest bounties and several ridiculously powerful objects all show up in the same year by coincidence?”

“Pretty unlikely, I’d say.”

-

It only takes a couple days for Kravitz to turn up again. This time it’s a warm, late summer afternoon. The sun is painting the lake in rich reds and golds, and Julia is playing fetch with Brutus along the water’s edge when Kravitz materializes beside her. 

“Did he call?” she asks. 

“Yes,” says Kravitz, he grins helplessly, lighting up in a way she’s never seen before. Julia finds herself grinning back, and she instantly likes Taako significantly more now that she knows he can put that expression on Kravitz’s face.

“And?”

“He took me to the Chug N’ Squeeze.”

Julia chokes and coughs and says, “Is that a  _ brothel _ ?”

“No,” says Kravitz quickly. “Wine and pottery, though now you mention it that  _ is _ a very unfortunate name.”

“Oh,” says Julia. She narrows her eyes. “So...was it a date?”

“He was worried I’d kill him if we met in private,” says Kravitz, his joy fading a little. 

“Uh-huh,” says Julia, because even if that’s true on some level, the Chug N’ Squeeze does not sound like a place of tactical advantage. “So he very cautiously and reasonably met you on neutral ground alongside his armed and wary allies?”

“Well, no,” says Kravitz. 

“Was anyone there except the two of you?”

“Other people were at the - the Chug N’ Squeeze,” hedges Kravitz. 

“You mean other couples, on  _ dates _ ?”

Kravitz shrugs. 

Julia rolls her eyes. “Okay, so what did you  _ do _ ?”

“We talked,” says Kravitz. “Pretty honestly, which I think is not usual for him. They  _ are _ hunting grand relics, which sounds ridiculously dangerous. There was one in Refuge that kept everyone running through a loop for an hour on the day that the town was destroyed by a giant purple worm. It took them twelve loops to fix it, and apparently they managed to end on pretty decent terms with the worm, which...what the actual fuck, right? And we made a bowl and a lot of vases and got pretty tipsy and I - er - I sort of asked if it was a date.”

“ _ And _ ?” demands Julia. 

“Yes? I think? He said he was interested and that he, uh, ‘likes my style,’” says Kravitz. 

Julia bursts out laughing. 

“What?” he asks. 

She shakes her head. “You just -” she laughs again. “You remind me of me and Magnus. Taako is definitely Magnus in this comparison.” She grins at him. “So? Did you kiss him?”

Kravitz sighs. “No. I thought I sensed a lich and I went all skullface on him and his umbrella tried to kill me and then I...y’know, said I hoped I’d see him soon but not in a dead way, and I left.”

Julia pinches the bridge of her nose. “His  _ umbrella _ \- ? Are  _ all  _ of your interactions with people this weird and hard to follow?”

“No,” says Kravitz, his expression a little goofy. “It’s pretty much just these guys.”

They’re quiet for a while, both lost in thought as they take turns tossing sticks for Brutus.

“So now what?” asks Julia eventually. 

“Now I plead their case to the Raven Queen,” says Kravitz with a sigh. “Istus is on their side, so hopefully that will help. Raven and Istus have always been close.”

“Well,” says Julia, winding her arm around his elbow and leaning her head on his shoulder. “Good luck.”

“With Raven or Taako?”

“I think you’ll need it for both,” says Julia. 


	3. The Hunger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Hunger arrives and starts fucking shit up. Kravitz comes up with an excellent bad plan. Jenkins and Mad Brian are still in jail, and half of them are sort of reasonable about it.

Julia wakes up one morning to find that she’s uncomfortable. The fabric of her blankets is a little too scratchy, the mattress a little too stiff, the pillows not full enough. Brutus keeps repositioning himself and sighing, so she doesn’t think it’s just her, and she wonders if it’s possible for spirits to get colds or if it’s a mood thing. She gets up with a sigh and grabs some tea from the counter, and it’s not bad but it’s a little too bitter, as if it was left to steep for too long. Julia frowns at it and heads out to the porch to keep working on her latest project. She notices, when she glances around, that everything is just a little dull and blurry, so she focuses on remembering trees and grass and flowers and water. Everything sharpens up as she focuses on it, but it fades again pretty quickly and it makes her head hurt, so she makes a note to bring it up with Kravitz and gets to work. 

She’s at it for less than an hour when there’s an earthquake. It’s not the first one Julia has ever experienced, but in all the years since she’s died, there’s never been any kind of weather or environmental change at the cabin that wasn’t connected to her mood. She startles, dropping her hammer and chisel and frowns, wondering if she’s upset without realizing it, but before she can reach down to pick up her tools Brutus is pressing his side against her legs, growling low in his throat. The lake roils with a similar displeasure as small lines of darkness spread out over its surface and it takes a moment for Julia to realize that the lines are only a reflection. She looks up with icy trepidation trickling down her spine and sees them spreading out over the sky, like ink spilled across parchment. They reach out in every direction and then curl down to touch the ground in massive swirling columns and where they make contact, monstrous shadowy shapes step out, armed and menacing. 

Julia leaves her fallen tools where they lie, and an instant later she feels the familiar weight of her old short swords in her hands. She calls to the ancients to move, not to let the darkness touch them. Some listen, but some don’t, and she watches, helplessly furious, as the first of the dark monsters reaches the water. Just their touch turns the water into inky tar and the spirits within begin to flounder. 

Julia turns and runs. Brutus and the ancients who heeded her follow as she races toward the farmhouse. She arrives to find more of the shadows laying siege to it, and she rushes them with her companions at her side. The shadows seem surprised for a moment but it only lasts long enough for her to get one good hit in and then they’re fighting back. 

Julia worries endlessly about Brutus, but the years he wears comfortably around the cabin seem to just melt off and he’s suddenly young and quick and vicious. It’s been ages since the rebellion, and Julia hasn’t exactly practiced fighting since she died, but everything comes back to her as if it was yesterday. Her swords flash, blocking and jabbing and swiping, and she feels an old, familiar sense of elation at being powerful and  _ deadly _ . 

But even when they dispatch the last of the siege team, she can see more monsters heading their way. “Daddy!” She screams. “Mum!”

The door opens and her parents cautiously edge out, armed with crossbows and axes. 

“We have to go,” says Julia, relieved to see them whole and...well, still dead, but at least not  _ consumed _ . “Now,” she adds. 

They don’t bother trying to grab anything from the house - none of it is real anyway -  and they fall in with her and the rest of her motley crew as she takes off running, leading the lot of them back into the trees and away from the monsters. 

“Where are we going?” asks Mari. 

“We’re going to grab some people and head to the prison,” says Julia, sounding pretty confident for someone who just invented that answer on the fly. 

“The prison?” repeats Steven with some concern. 

Julia shrugs. “It’s the only place I know of that might be fortified and real enough that we - and  _ they _ \- can’t change it with a thought.”

“Fair enough,” he mutters.

On the way she searches out the people she’s met while exploring - Hurley and Sloane and Jacob, whose sister is with him - and she gathers any strangers or ancients she finds along the way. By the time they get Maureen out of her lab, they’ve got a pretty large group but it’s obvious that they’re fighting a losing battle. All of the uninhabited areas between personal afterlives have been completely consumed by inky darkness, and most of the afterlives aren’t faring well either. The ‘forest’ Julia uses to travel between her lake and everywhere else is little more than bulky brown and green shapes at this point, an abstraction that is considerably more difficult to navigate. When they finally reach the prison, the water that surrounds it is an undulating mass of thick tar and Julia scowls at it, trying to come up with a way across. When she gets too close to the edge, the tar rises up with sticky, dripping claws to try and grab at her feet. She dances back with a hiss. 

“Look,” whispers Hurley. She points, and Julia sees the ancients from her lake arching up over the sea, one after the other, building a bridge for the rest of them. 

“Hurry!” Julia shouts, pointing everyone toward the bridge. “ _ Run!” _

And they do. Julia brings up the rear as they all sprint forward, making sure no one gets left behind. The tar claws rise up to pull at the ancients forming the bridge as well, but Julia’s strange friends flow out of the way like they’re made of the water they lived in and she has to try not to think about that too hard, afraid that the ground beneath her will stop being solid if she stops believing it’s solid. 

She’s the last one across, and she shouts at the lake spirits to follow as she passes them but the one on the far bank gets caught by a lucky tar claw as it begins to move and part of it dips below the surface with a strange, deep cry as more claws reach up to pull it the rest of the way in. Julia screams with pure fury and rage, but the other lake spirits have joined her on the prison’s island and there’s no path back, nothing she can do but watch. Behind her, she hears Jacob’s little sister ask a question in a terrified, tremulous voice, and Julia forces herself to turn away from the ancient’s death and storm up to the doors of the prison. They are heavy and solid and, predictably, barred shut. 

She pounds on them as the sea tries again and again to crawl onto the shore, but it can’t seem to maintain consistency as the claws get further from its main, undulating mass. After a long, worrying moment, one of the doors swings open to reveal a bewildered Kravitz. He pulls her into a hug immediately, his cold hands pressed into her back. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he breathes, before stepping back out of the way and ushering everyone in. Julia watches them pour through the door and helps Kravitz bar it behind them. 

“What’s going on?” she asks. 

“I don’t know,” says Kravitz. “I’ve never seen anything like this. They aren’t alive  _ or _ dead, they don’t speak, they just spread into every available space and consume  _ everything _ . And we’re completely cut off, I can’t contact Raven or open my doorway to the material plane. I’ve been trying to get a message to Taako but if this is happening everywhere...” He trails off, not willing to give voice to the idea that Taako, Merle and Magnus might have already been overrun. He leans forward and lowers his voice. “Magnus died again.”

Julia searches his face. “But he’s not here.”

“I don’t think so,” says Kravitz. “But like I said, I can’t get through, and I haven’t...the other Reapers are gone. There’s no one to lead the dead across.”

“Okay,” says Julia, compartmentalizing that away the same way she did the night the Craftsman’s Corridor collapsed, when she turned away from her father’s obvious demise toward something she could change. “There’s gotta be something we can do. Ideas?”

“Only one, really  _ really _ bad one,” says Kravitz. He glances past Julia, at Maureen. “Remember Legion?”

Maureen’s eyes go wide. “But you don’t - you weren’t  _ in  _ there,” she says. “I barely threw off the ones who came through with me, Legion was  _ thousands _ . It isn’t controllable, it’s just... _ fury _ .”

“Explain,” demands Julia, and they do. Julia starts to pace as she listens, and the others array around them. “But last time, Legion was just prisoners. Right? Nothing but angry souls who wanted back into the world of the living.”

Maureen nods. 

“So we just need to temper all of that reckless vengeance with some good, old-fashioned altruism,” says Julia. “If some of us within Legion are focused on a different goal, on protecting people, it could work, right?”

“Us?” repeats Kravitz. 

Julia raises an eyebrow at him. “Yes. Us. I’m going.” Kravitz starts to shake his head and Julia fixes him with a glare and says, “How many people can you trust in this building right now, buddy?”

Kravitz glances around at their ensemble, but he doesn’t seem to recognize anyone other than her and Maureen. “One,” he says with a sigh. 

“Then that one is definitely going to be part of Legion, because otherwise it’s going to turn into a hot mess,” says Julia. She considers their current situation and amends, “A hotter mess.”

“You just  _ assume  _ I meant you?” he asks, folding his arms over his chest.

“Of course you meant me,” says Julia. 

“I could have been talking about Maureen,” says Kravitz. 

“Maureen would be in prison if you weren’t a giant softy,” says Julia. “I like her but that is not a great recommendation.”

“There’s a prison therapist,” says Kravitz. 

“Whose name is...?” asks Julia. 

“Doctor...” Kravitz thinks about it for a moment and then sighs. “Fine.” He glances at the rest of them. “Any other volunteers?”

Nearly everyone raises their hand. Jacob tries to push his little sister’s hand down, but she throws him off and then suddenly she’s bigger and beefier than he is, and her hand is raised high over his head. 

Julia blinks and shoots Kravitz a confused look and he shrugs. 

“Kids are less attached to the rules of the material plane,” he says. “They tend to be a little more creative with what they look like.”

“You mean I could’ve just turned into a giant fucking tarrasque and started squishing those shadow dicks under my massive toes?” asks Julia. 

“Theoretically,” says Kravitz. “But it would be pretty hard to make a solid enough tarrasque to fight with. Humans have a hard time conceiving of the scale of them.” 

Julia glares at him. 

“By all means, experiment with altering your shape. But right now I think we need to discuss ways to get out of this plane without access to my powers,” says Kravitz. 

Hurley raises her hand, and Kravitz gestures for her to speak. 

“I’m not sure about the planar travel thing, but Sloane and I would like to go to Goldcliff. If we’re gonna have to fight, having a massive battlewagon army would come in pretty handy.”

“Even if I was willing to let a couple spirits loose on their own, you wouldn’t be able to operate or interact with anything without a corporeal form,” says Kravitz. 

“Well,” says Sloane. “It’s been about a year, right? I created a tree and buried us within it when Hurley died. Let us go back as Dryads.”

Kravitz considers this for a moment and then shrugs. “That’s not how that’s usually works, but I don’t think Pan or Raven would mind, given the circumstances. Sure.”

Hurley and Sloane share a celebratory high-five. 

The group that stays to discuss the planar issue ends up being pretty small. Most of the others don’t know enough to contribute, so they work on fortifying the prison by barricading the windows and doors or they start making preparations for the creation of Legion. 

Julia, Kravitz, Sloane, and Maureen end up moving into a smaller chamber off the entrance hall where they can talk without distraction, and after a few minutes Kravitz leaves to retrieve a few prisoners as well. He comes back with two lanky men, and introduces them as Brian and Jenkins. 

Both of them give Kravitz a wide berth, but they seem friendly enough toward everyone else. The group spends several hours talking, and eventually they have three good ideas to try and numerous bad ones if those don’t work. As the discussion winds down Kravitz and Maureen go to oversee the preparations for Legion, leaving Sloane and Julia to keep an eye on Brian and Jenkins. 

There’s an awkward silence for a few minutes before Brian says, “I don’t think I caught your names, darlings?” and beams at them. 

“Sloane and Julia,” says Sloane gruffly, pointing to designate which is which. 

“ _ Lovely _ ,” says Brian. “And how long have you two been here?”

“A year,” says Sloane. 

“Six years,” says Julia. 

“Oh  _ wow _ ,” says Brian, smiling at Julia. “A regular  _ alumnus _ , aren’t you? Jenkins and I are just a few months apart, we’ve been here a bit more than a year.”

“ _ Please _ shut up,” says Jenkins. 

“I’m only being friendly,” says Brian defensively. He turns to the two women, holding a hand up to hide his mouth from Jenkins as he stage whispers, “Jenkins is still  _ very  _ angry about dying, poor thing.”

“What happened?” asks Julia. 

“I was  _ murdered _ by  _ idiots _ ,” says Jenkins. 

“Now, now,” scolds Brian. “Doctor Talbot says we have to take responsibility for our own actions, yes? And who tried to kill who first, hmm?”

“I didn’t try to kill them,” insists Jenkins. 

“Ah, yes,” says Brian, his strange, high voice dripping with sarcasm, “I too have often left my customers with a nice big murder crab as a gesture of goodwill.” He rolls his eyes for Julia and Sloane’s benefit, and the two of them share a confused glance. 

“Okay first of all,” snaps Jenkins, turning and unfolding his thin arms so he can gesticulate angrily at Brian, “I didn’t summon the crab to kill anyone, I summoned it to burn away the evidence of a murder that had  _ already _ been committed.”

“By  _ you _ ,” says Brian. 

“Well, yes, but it’s not like they were friends with the victim,” says Jenkins dismissively. “They weren’t friends with anyone, they were jerks to every single person on the train. And it’s not  _ my _ fault if the crab got bored. And -  _ and! -  _ It probably didn’t even  _ want _ to fight them in the first place - it was  _ very _ well fed! I bet they  _ bullied _ it into fighting them! They probably sat there saying  _ wow crab what a total loser you are _ , and  _ I totally boned your mom, crab _ , and  _ how come you aren’t even using your spell slots crab what a terrible crab you must be! _ And the crab only wanted to show them that they were  _ wrong _ about him and he  _ wasn’t _ a terrible crab at all, he just didn’t feel like wasting spell slots on every dumb little thing when he could save them for really impressive shit like  _ summoning fiery murder crabs and massive flesh golems _ !”

“You know you aren’t looking too good in this story, right?” asks Sloane.

“Look,” says Jenkins, “I was not a  _ great _ person. I get that. I murdered rich people and took their things. Some people might consider that charitable-”

“Ah - except that you kept all those things for yourself to support your alarmingly out of control horticultural habit,” interjects Brian.

Jenkins continues as if he can’t hear Brian at all. “But the point is, it was wrong, and I understand that. But that  _ does not _ mean that those idiots were in the right!”

“Well they can’t be  _ complete _ idiots, they solved your train puzzle,” says Brian. 

“A  _ ten-year-old _ solved my train puzzle!” snaps Jenkins. 

“Is that...better?” asks Julia. 

“He was a very gifted ten-year-old,” says Jenkins defensively. He glares at Brian. “Why are you defending them anyway? They killed  _ you _ too.”

“Oh yes, twice,” says Brian, “Yes, but I actually do kind of like them. And while I’m still angry about missing out on my wedding, I’m a big enough person - you have to be a big person to go to Harvard you know - I’m a big enough person to admit that if I  _ had  _ gotten the gauntlet like I wanted to I probably would have just murdered a lot of people and then died horribly, like Merle’s ugly little cousin, yes?”

Jenkins rolls his eyes. 

“Merle?” repeats Sloane. “Merle Highchurch?”

“Yes,” sneers Jenkins. “One of the three idiots who killed us.”

“You mean Merle, Taako and Magnus?” asks Julia, blinking at them. 

“Oh yes,” says Brian cheerfully. “Taako was my favorite.”

“Taako was the  _ worst _ ,” groans Jenkins. 

Sloan glares at him. “Don’t say things I agree with.”

“Did he kill you too?” asks Jenkins. 

“No, he beat her in a race,” says Julia. 

“Well when you say it like  _ that _ it sounds like a really petty grievance,” says Sloane. 

Kravitz returns, looking exhausted, and says, “We’re ready to start forming Legion.” He glances at Brian and Jenkins. “Which means it’s time for you to go back to your cells.”

“What?” demands Jenkins. “We should be in Legion!”

Kravitz shakes his head. “I can’t risk that. I need Legion focused on the enemy, and Doctor Talbot says that on that front, you are not going to be able to differentiate between the ravenous goop outside and the Bureau’s Reclaimers.”

“That’s fair,” says Brian amiably. “I do like Taako but if I saw him again I would still try to murder him. I’m really  _ very _ upset about my wedding.”

Jenkins rolls his eyes again. “But more to the  _ point _ , this is about the  _ entire world. _ Who even cares about those little shits?”

Kravitz, Sloane and Julia all say, “I do,” in unison, and Brian half raises his hand. Jenkins glowers at him. 

“Sorry,” says Brian.

“Let’s go,” says Kravitz. 

Reluctantly, the two wizards rise and follow him back out the door, and Julia slumps into a chair.

“You okay?” asks Sloane. 

Julia nods and then shrugs. “The more I learn the more it seems like Magnus is involved in every weird thing that’s happened in the last decade and it just feels too big for some silly young couple from Raven’s Roost, and I just...Did I even know him?”

“Of course you did,” says Sloane. She sits down beside Julia and considers her words for a moment before she says. “Two things. Okay? First:  _ this  _ is pretty big too. All these people here - not including prisoners, obviously - we’d all be gross shadowy goop if you hadn’t come for us. Second...big doesn’t always save the day, y’know? Magnus and the others helped Hurley try to talk me down, but in the end, nothing they did worked. In the end it was just Hurley loving me enough to walk through a literal storm of silverpoint poison that saved Goldcliff. You love Magnus, and he loves you. That’s stronger than any of this, no matter how big it gets.”

-

Kravitz pulls Julia aside when he gets back from locking Brian and Jenkins away and says, “I’m arranging this to give you the most control. It’ll still be hard, but you should be running the show in there.”

“Okay,” says Julia. 

“Jules,” says Kravitz, and she looks up at his face and sees endless, heavy worry etched there. 

“I’m up for this Kravitz,” says Julia. 

“Yes,” says Kravitz. “You’re very brave. But I don’t know what we’re going to find over there, and I don’t know how well Legion will fare against these things, and I don’t...I don’t know anything. And I know that you don’t know anything either. But I need you to just promise me that I’m not about to lose everyone I’m sending into this. I need you to promise me you’ll still be around on the other side.”

Julia smiles and hugs him. “I care about you too, Kravitz.” He closes his eyes and hugs her back. 

She doesn’t make the promise, because she can’t ensure any of those things and she has a personal policy against lying to her friends, but she kisses his cheek before she pulls away and moves to take her place with the rest of the people who are going to become Legion.

Kravitz sighs and whispers, “Good luck.”


	4. Legion Wakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Legion fucks some shit up, and Taako tries to do a nice thing. Lup gives him a 7/10 for the effort.

The transition is nearly instant. She is herself, standing among many others who are not her, and then they are all the same thing. Sharing her awareness and existence with other people is bewildering; there is just so much  _ information _ . Likes, dislikes, fears, worries, hopes, memories - each person is a universe unto themselves and each of those universes exists alongside hers now. She doesn’t even have a word for what it’s like to have the ancients along for the ride. They aren’t just one soul who has lost shape and let go of all the meticulous concerns of the material plane - they are  _ thousands _ . Legion is massive. Julia is now just one small part of a whole, and that whole sits up. A thousand thousand thoughts flit through their body, and a thousand thousand eyes look down at Kravitz, Sloane, and Hurley. 

Legion tries to speak, but realizing that impulse is  _ hard _ . It’s like trying to push over a castle with your bare hands, but even as that thought forms, they remember that they are  _ massive  _ now and that they have a thousand thousand hands. They push. 

“ _ How do I look?” _ ask thousands of voices in unison. Sloane and Hurley grimace at the sound as they give Legion a thumbs up.

-

Kravitz tries all of Brian, Maureen, and Jenkins’ ideas, and none of them work. He tries to contact Taako again and that doesn’t work either. He looks exhausted and helpless and angry and Legion feels a thousand bursts of sadness and hopelessness and loss and anger, and then they feel wind stir against their faces. 

Kravitz, Sloane, Hurley and Legion look up as blue light washes over them, filling their minds with a strange, impossible story. And then a green light washes over them, filling their ears with a beautiful, impossible song. Within Legion, a thousand hearts fill to bursting with hope and love, and above them, weak gray light pours down from a massive circle of flat black glass that forms across the ceiling. As they watch, magic crawls across it, trying to turn it to sapphire. Twice the magic makes it part of the way across and then fails and returns to its source, which is somewhere out of sight. 

“Get ready,” says Kravitz. Legion looks down to see that he’s talking to Sloane and Hurley. “It’s not enough to sustain a portal, but I think I can shove the two of you through.”

The magic crawls across the glass a third time and Kravitz expends a burst of power and suddenly, Hurley and Sloane are gone. A moment later the glass is just glass again, the third attempt having failed, and then there’s a long, tense pause. 

Legion and Kravitz wait, and they watch, and with that strange song still echoing in their chests, they  _ hope _ . And then, suddenly, there’s an explosion, and crackling red lightning, and the glass turns to sapphire all at once. Legion can see the sky, tinted by the sapphire window, and they can see the inky columns of Hunger pouring down from the sky, and then Kravitz is above them, kneeling on the other side of the sapphire. 

His face transforms into stunned joy, and Legion sees him blowing into his hands long before they see the narrow feet that race across the circle to collide with him. Legion watches, and listens, and waits. Parts of them are eager to move, to fight, but the part of them that used to be Julia holds the rest still to give Kravitz another moment of his reunion.

Legion sees the flash of another explosion in the distance and hears a rumble, and then they see a face towering over the sapphire that rivals their own face in size. It’s made of the same shadowy substance that forms all of the Hunger’s monsters and slowly, Legion’s mouth curves into a smile. They begin to move. 

The creature above them raises an open hand and swings it down to squash Taako and Kravitz, but Legion’s hand rises through the sapphire portal to grab it by the wrist, arresting its momentum. Legion reaches up with their other hand to pull themselves up through the portal and into the material plane, and when they stand fully in front of the massive shadow monster, they lean into its face and roar with thousands of voices. 

Legion shoves the creature away from Kravitz and Taako and the people gathered around them and then dives after it, with fury and vicious joy. They roll the creature into a valley and fight the way that Julia learned to fight, quiet and fast and brutal. Or, relatively quiet. Legion isn’t screaming anymore, but every move they make thunders across the landscape. 

The Hunger’s massive creature is not prepared for any of this. It swings clumsily at Legion, tries to grapple them and hold them still to spare itself their jabs and punches, but Legion squirms away. Parts of it are young and imaginative, and they remember that bodies are malleable when you’re a spirit. Parts of it are ancient and fluid, and they remember the way they flowed away from the Hunger’s claws when they were forming a bridge for their small friends. And so Legion flows away from the creature’s grip and then their hand becomes long and sharp and they drive it through the creature’s chest and then across its throat. It becomes ash beneath them and dissolves, and Legion climbs to their feet and looks around. There’s another of the massive Hunger creatures in the distance but as Legion watches, it gets sideswiped by a purple worm, and so Legion turns instead toward the nearest shadowy column. They lean down to grip it near the ground and rip it away from the earth before tearing it to pieces. It’s effective, if unrefined, and so Legion moves forward again to do the same thing to the next one, and the next. And there seem to be an endless supply of shadowy columns, but there are parts of Legion that know that  _ nothing  _ is endless, not life or death or grief and certainly not this clumsy gnawing hunger either. 

-

When the columns of shadow stop forming, Kravitz brings Legion back through the sapphire pool and down into the prison. This time the transition is longer, and stranger, and in some indefinable way, painful. But eventually Julia is just Julia again, and when she looks up at Kravitz he gives her a small, tired grin and asks her to wait while he wraps a few things up. 

This time, when he contacts the Raven Queen, she answers. More than that, she appears before him, her black opal eyes wide with concern. She touches Kravitz’s face like a worried mother assuring herself that her child is okay, and Julia feels as if she’s intruding when Kravitz tells her the other Reapers are gone and the beautiful, wild array of feathers that rise up from her head where a human’s hair would be seem to droop as she closes her strange black eyes in pain. She only takes a moment for her grief, and then the Raven Queen sets the prison back in order and flings its front doors open to step outside and deal with the rest of her domain. Kravitz leaves her to it and walks back over to Julia, reaching for her hand. 

“Come with me,” he says. 

Julia expects to end up at her little cabin, but instead Kravitz pulls her back up through the portal. They float up from the sapphire circle and the ghostly remains of Phandalin and toward the moon, or something that looks like the moon. When they get closer, Julia can see that it’s a floating platform of domes, and she gapes as Kravitz leads her through the place, down through hallways full of people rushing back and forth and to a room, finally, where he knocks. 

The door is opened by Barry, who looks like he regrets the decision instantly. “Heeeeey,” he says. “Uh, it’s...it’s Kravitz, right?”

“I’m not here about Lup,” says Kravitz. 

Julia perks up. “She’s alive?”

Kravitz shrugs. “She’s a lich.”

“Cool,” says Barry. “Cool, cool, cool.” He glances at Julia and then back at Kravitz and considers for a moment before straightening his shoulders. “I’m a lich too.”

Kravitz sighs. “This really isn’t-”

“We did it together, I mean, and-”

“I know,” says Kravitz. “It was in the story. Is Magnus here?”

“Oh,” says Barry. “Um. Yeah?”

“Move, Barold, you’re blocking the hotness,” says a voice from within the room, and Barry slinks away to cede his place at the door to Taako, who leans against the doorframe. “I hope you came to celebrate because that is all we’ve got time for here in Taako Town. Who’s your friend?”

He glances at Julia with carefully crafted disinterest. 

“Julia Burnsides,” she says. 

Taako stands up straight immediately. “Oh shit. Oh  _ shit _ . First room on the right, give me five minutes.” He closes the door. 

Kravitz and Julia glance at each other and then Kravitz shrugs and opens a portal and they step through it into a room that’s half workshop and half sleeping quarters and messy in the most wonderfully familiar way. If Julia still had a heart, it would be pounding.

After a few minutes they both hear Taako as he comes to a stop outside the door. “ Remember when you died and I very heroically snatched you from the jaws of the Astral Plane in a manner that we should probably definitely not mention to my maybe boyfriend now?”

Kravitz rolls his eyes.

“I guess,” says Magnus, and the ghost of Julia’s heart flips inside her chest at the sound of his voice. “Wasn’t he drowning at the time?”

“He obviously got better,” says Taako dismissively. “But the point is, you were a spirit and I was a spirit and I physically but not physically but kind of physically dragged you back from the abyss.”

“Sure,” says Magnus. “I’m still not really following though. Are you drunk? Is this what happens when you get drunk?”

“No, Magnus, when I get drunk I dance on tables, you have a literal century of anecdotal evidence on this,” says Taako. “I’m going to cast the spell I used to make me a spirit, but on you. You’re going to be a spirit for a little bit. I promise no one will destroy your body this time.”

“Well, good, because it’s pretty new still and I-”

“Shut up, the spell needs you to be not talking,” says Taako. 

“But why? We still haven’t really covered the why.”

“Science,” says Taako, and then a second later, in a rush to cut off whatever Magnus is going to say next, “Just trust me, okay?”

There’s a pause and Magnus says, “Alright, fuck it, yeah. Of course I trust you. Ooh, hey -” Magnus’ voice is louder as he calls across the room. “Lup, come here real quick!”

“What the fuck,” mutters Taako. 

There’s a slightly longer pause, and then a voice says, “Hey babe what’s - oh!”

A large semi-transparent arm flies through the wall and Magnus says, “Fuck this is weird. Hey, high-five me!” 

Kravitz sighs and moves forward, grabbing the arm that’s still floating in the wall and pulling it the rest of the way through, and Magnus with it. He shivers. “That’s even weirder, what the-” He freezes when he spots Julia, staring at her like he’s been slapped by a hand the size of Legion’s. “Jules?” he asks quietly, as if afraid a loud noise will scare her off. 

She grins at him and opens her mouth to respond but they’re interrupted by a loud noise from outside the door.

“Well, shit,” says Taako. 

“You really should have had him sit somewhere first,” says Lup. 

“Thanks for your timely and incredibly helpful advice,” says Taako acidly as he shoves the door open and tries to push one of Magnus’ big legs through it. He glares at Magnus’ body and tries fruitlessly to push it again and then sighs and casts a levitation spell. Magnus’ head hits the doorframe pretty hard and all five of them wince. 

“ _ Dude _ ,” says Magnus, “I  _ just _ got that.”

“Sorry,” says Taako. 

Lup hovers in the doorway and everyone watches as Taako attempts to situate Magnus’ body on the bed without causing any further damage. When he’s done, he straightens up and looks around at the rest of them with a triumphant smile. 

“So what was the point of all this?” asks Lup. 

“Hi,” says Julia with a little wave. “Magnus is my husband and I haven’t seen him since I died six years ago.”

Lup goes from surprised to thrilled to irritated in about two seconds. “Taako, grab your boyfriend so we can get the hell out of here.”

“I was doing a nice thing!” says Taako defensively. 

“And I’m very proud of you babe, maybe next time you can pull it off without three and a half extra wheels.”

Taako blows his hair out of his face irritably. “Fine. You’ve got an hour Mango, try not to get creeped out by your empty meat shell my dude.” He grabs Kravitz by the wrist and tugs him out of the room. Lup shoots Magnus and Julia a wink and then a gust of wind slams the door shut behind the three of them.

The room is quiet for a moment.

Julia drifts closer to Magnus and reaches out tentatively to touch his face. She worries that she’ll go through him, even though she’s been able to touch everyone she’s met in the Astral Plane, but when she feels his beard and skin beneath her hand they both blow out relieved sighs and he closes the rest of the distance between them, wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in her hair. “ _ Gods _ I’ve missed you,” he whispers. 

She laughs and presses kisses wherever she can reach, along his his neck and cheek and brow, and then he finally loosens his grip enough for her to lean back and kiss him square on the mouth. They spend several long, luxurious minutes not saying anything at all before his breath hitches strangely and he says, of all things, “I’m sorry.”

It’s such a ridiculous and out of place statement that Julia laughs again. “For  _ what _ ?”

“I -” He takes a step back, running a hand through his hair, though his other hand stays firmly anchored in Julia’s. “For  _ everything _ . For not being there, and for - for taking so long, I guess, to get back to you.”

Julia frowns at him. “What?”

He sighs. “I spent a lot of time after - after you -”

“Died,” supplies Julia with a wry smile. 

He winces. 

“Magnus,” she says. “You’ve died thirty-two times, I think we’re past being bashful about it.”

“Fair point,” says Magnus. “Thirty-two? Really?”

“That’s the current tally, yeah,” says Julia. “You better start being careful, I hear the thirty-third time’s the charm.”

Magnus laughs a little but he still looks distressed. “Well, I spent a lot of time after you died looking for something noble and - well, dangerous I guess - to throw myself at to get...to get back to you? But it didn’t happen and I think it’s...I think it’s going to be a long time yet and I just feel like I left you there to die and now I’m abandoning you all over again and I-” His face twists with misery as his throat tightens and chokes off whatever he would have said next. 

Julia tugs on his hand, pulling him back to her and resting her forehead against his. “I don’t want you to die, Magnus.”

He closes his eyes and the tears spill over to slide down his cheeks. Julia kisses each tear track gently.

“I love you with all my heart, and I have missed you  _ so _ much, but Magnus...we’re going to spend literally the rest of eternity together once you make it to the other side. I can easily wait another century for that, though I don’t think you’ve got another one in you.”

He gives her a wet smile and a small laugh, and Julia smiles at him, taking his face in her hands. “I have been so worried about you. Thinking that you were alone and hurting and...and just looking for a way out. And I can’t tell you how glad I am that you have people, and that you want to be here for them. The world deserves all the good that you bring to it, Magnus.”

He pulls her into a hug, resting his chin on top of her head. “All those years, all those worlds, that whole journey...you make it all worth it. Everything else is icing.”

Julia grins. “Still, you might’ve mentioned you were an alien when we got married.”

“I didn’t know,” says Magnus, surprised. He leans back to look at her and wipes his face off. “That wasn’t in the story? It’s kind of hard to keep straight which things were and which things we remembered before that...”

“No,” says Julia, frowning. “You - what?”

He shrugs. “Fisher - you know how Fisher can eat things and everyone forgets them?”

Julia nods. 

“Well Fisher ate all our mission notes,” says Magnus. “I didn’t know I wasn’t from here or what had happened, I couldn’t remember anything about it. You thought I just hid all that from you?”

She had, but she doesn’t say so. She just kisses him, and she feels him grin against her mouth.

“Nah,” he says when she finally breaks away, “I’m not crafty enough to hide anything from you Jules. But everybody’s talking about me and the Starblaster, crew - what about you? What’s the Astral Plane like? Is Kravitz cool? I thought the Hunger hit you guys pretty hard, were you - where were you?”

Julia tells him. They spend the rest of their time talking and kissing and rejoicing in one another’s presence, and an hour after Taako cast his spell Magnus gets sucked up into his body. He wakes and blinks groggily. “Aw man, he really knocked me good,” he mutters, pressing a hand gingerly to the spot where his head hit the doorframe. He looks up at her and reaches out, but their hands go through each other. 

“Well,” says Julia, putting on what she hopes is a convincingly playful smirk, though not being able to touch him makes her chest feel like an open wound, “Guess we’re gonna have to keep it PG from here on, eh?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he says, forcing a smile. They talk for another half hour or so before Kravitz returns and they’re forced to say goodbye.

“I love you, Jules,” says Magnus. 

“I love you too, Mags,” says Julia. “Don’t rush yourself.”

He gives her a lopsided smirk. “If you say so.”

-

Her cabin is gone. The lake is there, and the ancients who fled with her have eased back into it, and Brutus runs up barking when she and Kravitz appear, but the structure she built is gone and the lake isn’t as full as it was. 

“You could just wish the whole thing back into existence,” Kravitz points out.

Julia shakes her head. “No. Things change. It was here, and now it’s gone, and I’ll have to build a new one. I just wish they’d left the bed, I feel like I could sleep for a decade.”

Kravitz smiles and hugs her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last bit's an epilogue of sorts, in which Taako and Kravitz take a strange vacation. It should be up tomorrow.


	5. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julia and Taako make cookies, Magnus finds a way to send very short letters.

She rebuilds the cabin. Kravitz convinces the Raven Queen to hire Lup and Barry on as Reapers, which means that Julia starts getting pretty regular visits from the three of them. Kravitz’s happiness grows like a seedling; it seems small and sun-starved at first and then in the blink of an eye he’s a different person, someone who is flourishing, who smiles easily and laughs often. He talks about Taako constantly, and Lup always rolls her eyes and teases him for being a mandilón, but she smiles the whole time. Julia loves them, this strange extended family she’s inherited. Lup turns up when she’s exploring sometimes just to bum around with her. There are a lot more empty, abandoned sections of the Astral plane now than there were before the Day of Story and Song, and sometimes they both get quiet and sad about this, but eventually one or the other will shake it off and drag the other somewhere else, where there’s a gorgeous river to float in, or a snowy hill to sled down.

On one of these excursions they run into Cyrus and Gundren again, and Lup glowers at them as they fight, this time on top of the glass circle that was Phandalin.

“Even the Hunger didn’t want a piece of this, huh?” asks Julia loudly.

Cyrus looks up, reaching for his weapon, and then he freezes. “You healed her!” he says, forcing a grin.

Julia rolls her eyes.

“What?” asks Lup.

“I found them bickering outside of a vault, Cyrus kept insisting that he needed medical help for you because there had been an accident.”

“ _‘Accident_ ,’” huffs Lup. “He stabbed me in the back.”

“I wouldn’t-” begins Cyrus, but Julia cuts him off.

“You’re dead,” she tells them firmly. “Both of you. _You_ burned up all your treasure and died. And _you_ burned up a whole town and died. It sucks, but it happened. Please figure out how to process that.”

They both stare at her for a few minutes before sitting down, hard. Julia pulls Lup away from them, but the cloudy expression doesn’t leave her face so Julia takes her to Goldcliff. Specifically, to Sloane and Hurley’s Goldcliff. Large portions of the city are in disarray, but their shop was locked up and devoid of any souls to eat, so the battlewagons survived in tact. When Julia pulls the garage door open, Lup’s eyes nearly double in size.

“Holy shit,” she says. “Holy _shit_ these are badass!”

“Wanna race ‘em?” asks Julia with a lot more confidence than she feels.

Lup’s grin could eclipse the sun. “ _Yes_.”

It goes a lot better than Julia expected it to. Lup actually gets the hang of them pretty quickly, having driven similar things at various points in her long life, and she helps Julia get comfortable operating the massive machines.

Julia, for her part, just takes the portion of her mind that says that every part of this is dangerous and squashes it down, because she’s already dead and driving off an astral cliff can’t actually do much to her at this point. They spend the better part of a day racing around Goldcliff, and in the end they lay back on the roof of Hurley’s shop, tired and happy and warm under Goldcliff’s sun.

“Are you angry with him?” asks Julia.

Lup glances at her.

“Cyrus,” Julia clarifies.

“No,” says Lup, turning away again and flinging her arm over her eyes to shield them from the sun. “I’m angry at me, mostly. It wasn’t his fault. I made the thing and it overpowered him because of-fucking-course it did. But I also...” she sighs. “Taako and Lucretia still aren’t talking.”

This is something Kravitz hasn’t mentioned, and Julia watches Lup curiously. “Why?”

Lup sighs again. “Well, you know how the boys didn’t remember anything because Fisher ate the mission notes?”

“Yeah,” says Julia.

“Lucretia fed them to him,” says Lup.

“Like...on purpose?” asks Julia.

“Yeah,” says Lup.

Julia’s eyebrows knit together as she works her way through the implications of this information. “It went wrong with Davenport.”

“Yeah,” says Lup. “He didn’t have anything left with the mission gone. Lucretia kept him close to keep an eye on him instead of setting him up somewhere like she did with the other boys.”

Julia scoffs and Lup glances at her, raising her eyebrows in a question. “She made him a valet,” says Julia. “It’s not like she was charitably providing hospice care.”

“Yeah,” says Lup with a sigh. “I don’t think Dav’s talking to her either. He doesn’t come inland too often, and he usually sends group packages so he can address all of us rather than any one individual. Except Merle. I think he writes to Merle pretty regularly.”

“So...you want Taako to forgive her?” asks Julia.

Lup shrugs. “No. Not exactly. I just - we were together for so long, right? And that could have been miserable, but it wasn’t because we loved each other and supported each other and worked together. We were family. And then a lot of things happened and we were separated for a while but I guess I kind of hoped that we’d be together again, now that it’s all over. But we aren’t. And I guess I kind of feel like if I had been smarter with Cyrus I could have been there for Taako and he wouldn’t be as upset.”

Julia considers that. “But you get that that’s some bullshit your brain is playing on you, right?” she asks after a while.

Lup laughs.

“Because if you hadn’t died, you’d have forgotten everything. And if you had died but the umbrastaff hadn’t swallowed you, then what? You just haunt Taako even though you won’t be able to explain anything?”

“Fair,” says Lup. “And I get it. I know that what she did was shitty. But I also know she wasn’t trying to hurt us.”

“Asmodeus pays double for good intentions,” says Julia.

“Asmodeus?” asks Lup.

“Ruler of the Nine Hells,” says Julia.

“Ah.”

“Things change,” says Julia. “Sometimes that hurts, but you have to let it happen. They all still love you, even if they aren’t in one place, or don’t want to speak to each other.”

“Yeah,” says Lup.

“Want to race again?”

“Fuck yes.”

-

About a year later she and Brutus come around the side of the cabin from where they were working on a garden and find Taako standing out front with his hands in his pockets.

“Hey Taako,” says Julia. “You dead?”

“Nope, still kicking,” says Taako. “Kravitz and I are on vacation, but apparently his boss doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.”

Julia laughs. “Do you want to come in?”

He shrugs. “I guess.”

Julia leads him into the house and he goes immediately to the kitchen and starts to poke around.

“Do you want cookies?” he asks.

“ _Yes_ ,” says Julia emphatically.

He starts pulling out bowls and ingredients while Julia sits at the kitchen table and watches him. “How’s Magnus?” she asks.

“Great,” says Taako. “He trains guard dogs out of Raven’s Roost now.” There’s a pause in which he seems to wait for her to say something and then he adds, “He hates it when I call them that. He came up with some stupid name for them like Paw Protectors or Duty Dogs or something.”

Julia grins. “How about you?”

“I started a school,” says Taako. Julia already knows that - she heard about it from Kravitz - but she still asks, “For what?”

“Magic,” says Taako. “It’s more competitive than Nerdlord’s dumb institute.”

She assumes he means Lucas - Lup uses the term interchangeably for Lucas and Maureen but as far as Julia knows, Maureen is still keeping to herself in her own afterlife.

She watches him work for a few minutes, and eventually he says, “Magnus wants me to forgive Lucretia.”

“For making you forget?” asks Julia.

Taako makes a noise that isn’t really a yes or a no, it’s more of a grunt.

“Just Magnus?” asks Julia.

“Lup hasn’t brought it up in a long time, but I can tell she doesn’t like the tension,” says Taako. He stirs sugar and butter together with what Julia thinks is probably an unnecessary amount of intensity, but then _she’s_ not a multiverse-famous chef. She keeps quiet and watches him, and eventually he continues as if driven to fill the silence. “It’s not that she made us forget, though. I mean, it _is_ , because we’d been handling decisions together for over a hundred years and suddenly she can’t just fucking talk to us? She didn’t even _try_. Like sure, if you bring it up again, say _‘maybe this whole relic business was a bad idea on account of the endless wars it started’_ and we’re all like _‘nah I’m good with all those randos murdering one another, I feel really great about this’_ well sure, _then_ you can make us all forget and handle shit yourself. I would get that. But no, she just escalated immediately. But it’s not _just_ that, because _then_ she separated us.”

He adds a few things to the sugar mixture, stirs up a bowl of dry ingredients, and then starts to mix the two together with a large flimsy spatula. “Don’t get me wrong, _I_ was fine, but look at Magnus! Magnus’ death toll after a hundred years was only _nineteen_ , and you know why? Because he had people to look after. Every time he could, he stayed the whole year to make sure all the rest of us were fine. Does that sound like the guy I met in Neverwinter? Not a fucking chance. _That_ guy would have had at _least_ a fifty percent mortality rate because he just didn’t fucking care. He _high-fived_ the Phoenix Fire gauntlet for fucks sake.”

He dumps half a bag of chocolate chips into a bowl of light brown dough. “Lucretia tried to give me this line about how it was ‘for my own good’ because then I wouldn’t have to grieve for Lup or wonder where she’d gone or miss her but that’s horseshit; relationships aren’t just _facts._ Fisher doesn’t fucking eat feelings. You can’t just feed him a slip of paper that says ‘I feel super bummed today’ and have the feeling go away - I know, I _tried._ So just because they didn’t know _why_ they felt like they had holes in their chests the size of seven people doesn’t mean that they didn’t _feel_ it, or that they didn’t have to deal with those feelings alone after an entire century of never having to deal with anything alone. And I’m just supposed to invite her over for dinner and pretend like that’s cool with me?”

“Do you want to know what I think?” asks Julia.

“No,” says Taako, “I came here because all the brick walls I usually talk to were busy.”

“Then you should have tried a tree,” says Julia. “Grudges and hatred are heavy and toxic, and holding onto them like this starts to wear on you, so-”

“So you agree with Magnus?” he asks impatiently, rolling his eyes as he spoons dough onto a cookie sheet.

“No,” says Julia. “And if you interrupt me again I’ll toss you in the lake.”

Taako huffs, but he carries on with his work quietly.

“You’re still dancing around the problem. Look, I don’t know you very well, however much time I spend with your sister and your boyfriend. But Lup knows that those years alone were hard on you. I’m willing to bet the other five do too. So if you need to tell me it was easy and that you could spend a hundred years alone right now and not be bothered, that’s fine, and I’ll take your word for it. But you should talk to someone about how much what Lucretia did hurt _you_ , and not just what it did to the others, so you can process all that toxic shit out of you.”

Taako glares at the baking sheet, but he doesn’t offer up any comment, so Julia continues.

“But when I say that, and when I talk about letting go of grudges and anger, I don’t necessarily mean forgiveness. Magnus has a big heart, and I love him for that. Forgiveness comes pretty easily to him. But it isn’t like that for all of us, and it doesn’t have to be. Y’all grew real close on that ship, you became family, and that’s important and it’s valuable and we like to call things like that unbreakable but that’s not quite true. The _Hunger_ couldn’t break it. No amount of hardship that came crashing down on you could break it. But each one of you definitely could.”

Taako puts the baking sheet in the oven and then turns around, folding his arms over his chest without taking off her unicorn patterned oven mitts. “But _I’m_ not the one who broke anything.”

“I know,” says Julia. “That’s kinda my point. Lucretia made a choice. And maybe Magnus and Lup feel like trusting her is a safe bet now because there’s no chance of that happening again without the looming threat of the Hunger, but that wouldn’t be good enough for me. I need to be able to rely on the people I love when things go wrong, and I can’t do that if I’m waiting for them to just decide to make significant changes to myself and my life without my consent. That is unacceptable to me, and no one - not my friends or my parents and definitely not Magnus fucking Burnsides, though I love him with all my heart - is going to tell me that I have to suck it up and love someone I don't trust.

“So no, you do not have to invite Lucretia to your house. You do not have to correspond with her, or tell her that it’s all okay and forgotten. You may want to attend certain group events that she will be at, and you’ll have to figure out how to navigate that, but you don’t have to sit next to her or talk to her when you do. I can’t say that I wish she hadn’t done what she did, because if she hadn’t I wouldn’t have met Magnus. That’s super selfish but it’s also one hundred percent true. But I _can_ say that if she did that to _me_ , I would never fucking speak to her again.”

Taako considers this. “So we’re on Squad Lucretia Can Go Fuck Herself?”

“Let’s call that title a work in process,” says Julia. “I’d like something that would anagram better.”

“Haters not Traitors?” suggests Taako as he peels off the mitts and comes to sit across from her.

“We’re workshopping this now?” asks Julia.

“Well I’m not fucking talking about my feelings anymore, that’s for damn sure,” says Taako.

Julia snorts. “The Institute of Cutting Assholes Off?”

“Icao?” says Taako skeptically.

Julia shrugs. “We could make parody IPRE patches.”

“We could do that with any four letters, really,” says Taako.

“Squad Suffer No Fucking Fools?” offers Julia. “Snuff for short, because we snuff out bad relationships.”

“Sold,” says Taako. “I’ll leave a patch on your grave.”

“What good does that do me?” asks Julia.

“Well I’ll _also_ bring you a spectral version,” he says, rolling his eyes.

Later, when they’re eating fresh cookies and revelling over the fact that there are no mouth burns in the Astral Plane, he says, “I’m glad Magnus didn’t marry someone boring.”

“When has Magnus ever done anything boring?” asks Julia, thinking specifically of his penchant for intensely inappropriate high-fives.

“ _Please_ ,” says Taako, “he spends his free time carving fucking _ducks_.”

“You love it,” accuses Julia, because she does too.

“Do not.”

“I bet you have at least three.”

“It’s impolite to throw away gifts,” says Taako primly.

“Oh of course, I’m sure you’ve _never_ been _impolite_ before,” drawls Julia.

He rolls his eyes and then peers at her as if considering something. “Lup was right, you _are_ pretty easy to talk to.”

“I know,” says Julia, “I thought about sniping the prison psychiatrist position but I don’t think I could handle talking to Jenkins on a regular basis.”

Taako chokes on his cookie, and when Kravitz turns up a little while later the two of them are laughing so hard they can barely breathe as Taako tells Julia about the Rockport Express and the untimely demise of Jenkins’ precious greenhouse.

-

After about a decade, she starts getting dogs. She finds the first one on the porch one morning, and he looks up at her uncertainly. When she kneels down to let him sniff her hand she notices an engraved metal tag hanging from his collar. On the front is the name _Johann_ and on the back it says, _Magnus loves Julia._

Julia rolls her eyes, both at the tag and at the silly grin that spreads across her face. “Welcome, Paw Protector,” she says, scratching Johann’s head. He licks her hand.

A few years later, Johann and Brutus come running up to her as she gets back from visiting her parents’, leading another dog along with them. This one is called Redfield, and the back of her tag says, _Magnus REALLY loves Julia._

The next one is tiny and fierce and named Bear, and her tag says, _Magnus misses Julia kind of a lot._ The one after that is actually the size of a small bear but his name is Cha-Cha and his tag says, _This one scares easy, take care of him._ It takes Cha-Cha about five years to stop being terrified of the ancients in the lake, but when he does he starts spending all his time on a rock outcropping over the water where he lays on his back while the ancients take turns rubbing his belly. Shortly after Cha-Cha’s arrival, Julia finds a cat living under her porch and it takes about six months for the thing to sit still enough for her to read his tag, which proclaims his name to be Reaper and says, _He just showed up? Good w mice, bad w everything else. Love!_

Magnus sends her note after note, mostly declarations of love, occasionally tips for the dogs. She collects them all and puts them on hooks on the wall beside her bed, a growing collage of reminders that he’s thinking of her. All of the dogs are exceptionally trained, though Cha-Cha and Reaper have a tendency to scare the shit out of one another, but the only one that presents any real trouble is Bear. Despite her size she seems to feel that she is invincible, and while that may not have been an issue on the Material Plane, in the Astral Plane her sense of self defines what she’s actually capable of. She causes more damage to the cabin than any of the others in her pursuit of birds and squirrels, and one afternoon Reaper gets it in his head to sneak up and charge her from behind while she’s chewing on a bone she got from somewhere. Bear starts barking immediately, startling Reaper into a dead sprint away from her. He leaps up onto the banister and then the roof, which with any of the other dogs would mean he was in the clear, but Bear believes herself perfectly capable of jumping from the deck to the roof without the aid of the banister and so she does, and manages to tear several shingles free in her effort to catch the damn cat. Julia shouts after them as they go streaking into the woods, one right after the other, but they both ignore her. She sighs and sets her book down and goes inside to grab the ladder and tools she needs to repair the roof. She comes back out with several nails held in her mouth and props the ladder up against the roof before noticing that Brutus is on his feet, tail wagging, staring past her.

She turns to find Magnus crouched down next to Johann, watching her with a lopsided grin. She sets her tools down on her workbench, pulls the nails from her mouth, smiles and says, “You lived so much longer than I thought you were going to!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey my dude, thanks for reading! <3


End file.
